“I came as soon as Jenny called. I hope you don’t mind.”
Don’t apologize, she thinks, looking at the pads of flesh that extend his cheeks beyond the wire rims of his glasses and break the smooth line of his jaw. It makes her want to swat him aside. The one man who should have apologized to her never did.
“You probably saved my life,” she says, keeping her voice flat, not giving him anything to latch onto. “Not that it matters.”
“What do you mean by that?” He comes closer now. He has earned the right to lean over the bars on the bed and put his chubby face near. “This cut …” He pauses and motions towards her arm, letting his gesture express a meaning he won’t say. “The girls said it was an accident.”
She will not give him the satisfaction of knowing what this is about. He shouldn’t be here injecting himself into her life again.
“Of course it was. I was looking at a piece of broken pottery Zoe brought back from the sitter and it cut me.”
His eyes try to lock onto hers, try to pin her down. Behind the thick lenses the brown irises are enlarged, the pupils distended.
“That’s an unusual place to have something just cut you…”
“Don’t interrogate me, Tom. If you want to start that shit, you can leave.”
She has never had any problem being a bitch. There has always been the need to deflect people away from her when they get too close. Especially someone like Tom who wants to tie her down. She imagines him strapping her arms and legs to this hospital bed like they do to the prisoners or crazy people who are sick. She has to go on the offensive with him.
“Where are the girls?”
“They got tired of waiting. Hospitals are boring places. I had the TV on for them, but for some reason you can only get three channels, so I suggested they go to the gift shop and get a snack.” He backs off, standing more upright beside the bed again. “They are very concerned about their mother. Zoe in particular. She’s blaming herself for this.”
They must still be in the emergency ward, not a real hospital room, for taped to the wall behind Tom’s big head is a poster that shows the back of a human torso with the skin removed to reveal the deftly woven baskets of muscle that knit the body together. The corners of the poster are torn where it had been taped to a different wall previously. Someone put it up here as a kind of grim decoration. There are cutaways revealing the more interior bony structures. And beside the full torso of muscle and bone, there is a side view of the notched bones of the spine, interlocking like a chain, appearing in its elongated sinuous curve as nothing so much as the skeleton of a snake. Beneath it, the flat girdle of the bones of the pelvis are displayed, which makes Holly think for some reason with its spreading wings of a dried-out cow’s skull. The poster is called THE AMAZING BACK. Something a doctor can use to point out what’s wrong with you. Seeing these elaborate structures that conspire to give us form and function makes Holly curl up deeper within the pain at the back of her head, sink into her animal self. Closing her eyes again, she has a dim understanding that these mechanisms of flesh and bone must all work together perfectly to keep us alive.
Her mind forms a question that will divert him.
“How is your work going?” She knows that if she gets him started on this, he cannot help but talk about it.
“Oh, you know. Always the same partisan crap at the Statehouse. I’ve been working for eighteen months on the contracts for the new prison they want to build in Henderson, and it keeps getting stalled in committee. But they need it. The one they have now is filled to overflowing. Thirty-six percent above the legally allowable capacity, and the feds are taking away funding because of it. Every few weeks it seems some rapist or murderer they let out early to make room has killed someone again.” He starts pacing the floor as he talks about it. “It’s a growth industry, building prisons. He looks at her and shrugs his beefy shoulders. “What do I care? Either way, I get paid.”
Yes, he does get paid, very well. The bald fact of his money has always hung there between them, like his stubby cell phone, an electromagnetic device that can both repel and attract. Tom’s thoughts have been directed into the orbit of his work for the moment, and in his distraction he falls into the old habits of his technical curiosity, stepping carefully around to the other side of the bed to scrutinize the elaborate device that is recording the stream of data being produced by Holly’s body. He rests his hand on the bar at the side of Holly’s bed, and Holly observes it with the same technical dispassion. A curled star, hairless and well manicured, accustomed to working with papers and documents. Unbidden, the hand that turned the pages in that red book enters her head. Hands can do so many things, for better and for worse. She rolls her eyes away and sees the rippling mountains of Tom’s shirt, a landscape bulging with contours that shift and distort as he reaches up to touch the display screen above her head. His body was never unattractive to her; that was not the reason she never gave herself to him. All bodies have their own attractions. She often wondered what it would be like to have sex with him, a body padded and upholstered with flesh like a comfortable old couch. There is a curiosity about everyone new that is in fact perhaps the chief source of her seeking, the reason she is afraid of being tied down to a single man. The shock of having a new body exposed to her, like the raw, glossy photos on the pages of that book—the mind thrilled by a fresh set of sensations. Hard to imagine that Tom’s heavy broad back is underwoven with the same basket of muscles depicted on the poster taped to the wall, but even the most decrepit human bodies are a miracle in their finely tuned functioning, a treasure, as the poster baldly states: Amazing.
Another door slams in the corridor beyond. There is a sense of hurry here—these patients must be seen and cured and moved along. Another batch of injured and ill will be coming in soon.
“Tom,” she says, trying his name again, feeling it come out awkward and clipped. “I wanted to thank you. For coming when the girls called.”
He doesn’t turn around immediately—he senses an opening, what he has been waiting for. Then, the full force of his brown eyes is upon her.
“It was nothing. Jenny said I make a pretty good ambulance driver. We laid you in the back seat and Jenny crouched down in the floor well and watched over you, and I kept Zoe in front with me. She seemed to be the most upset by it.” He tries to soften. “They loved it when I laid on the horn, honking all the way through the red lights.” And then, to let her know he wasn’t taking unnecessary risks with the girls in the car. “You were bleeding pretty bad. Blood everywhere.”
“In your nice car? My God, it must be ruined.”
“Don’t worry, I can take it to the dealer to be cleaned. And if not, it’s about time for a new one anyway. I’m thinking more along the lines of a Range Rover, something a little more rugged. I don’t like the styling of the new Beamers.”
The squeak of many sneakers on the floor announces the girls to them. Zoe comes first, rushing her round face close to the metal bar that separates the realm of the bed from the rest of the room.
“Mommy!” she cries, her curly hair wavering, her cheeks red with the heat of conflicting emotions. She presses up on her tippy-toes to get her face over the bar, and Holly leans over to meet her there, accepting the energetic kiss she plants near the corner of her mouth. When the face is withdrawn, Holly can see that it is still draped with a cloud of fear as she furtively glances down the bedrail towards the bandage that encircles her mother’s wrist.
“It’s okay sweet,” Holly says. She lifts the arm above the railing to show her that the arm is still usable, still functioning in spite of the wound. “Just a silly cut. They patched me up and I’m going to be fine.” Jenny has been observing from afar, hanging back by the wall where the poster of the skinned torso maintains its sentinel station. And despite Holly’s tepid demonstration, she sees that Zoe’s face is still clouded by fear or guilt—probably both. Something more is needed.
“Zoe, this isn’t your fault. I was l
ooking for that piece of pottery and when I found it I was clumsy. You know how clumsy I can be …” Holly sends a smile with these words, trying to lift her girls out of the gloom she has created. Of course she should not leave them. That cool dark place that was calling her, with her girls standing near it seems a fragment of a dream that has settled into a night gone by. “Remember the time I sliced my finger open cutting the apple? That was an accident too.” And she has to thank Jenny, who has been growing more distant every day, her budding young teenager.
“It was scary, Mom,” Zoe says with a bit of relief in her voice now that the guilt has been lifted away from her. “All the blood …” Her voice trails off, burnished with the images that have been seared into her. Somehow, Holly thinks, she will have to make amends. Over time, she will have to make it up to them.
“You did the right thing, calling Tom. He tells me he’s a very good ambulance driver.”
“You should have seen us.” The excitement of this afternoon has been more of an adventure to Jenny, like the crimes and family disputes she sees on reality TV shows suddenly come to life in her own bedroom. “Weaving in and out of the cars, running red lights. It was like one of those police chases on Most Extreme Videos.” Then, ashamed of her own excitement, she qualifies her description. “We were afraid we wouldn’t get you here in time.”
Tom seeks to make his mark in all this, to cement his newfound status within this truncated family of women.
“Jenny was great. So calm. She knew exactly what to do. Applying pressure on the cut, elevating the arm.” He approaches the girl and swings his arm around her, drawing her near. But instead of returning the embrace as Holly has seen her do many times before, her daughter tenses and pulls away, the muscles of her back taut and rigid, banded across the shoulder blades by the tight T-shirt she wears, her body transformed from that of an innocent girl into a collection of parts that will be used by others over the years to come for their pleasure and gratification, nothing more than a collection of parts of me scattered all over this place, in the powder room we’d go to freshen up, standing before the mirror, rouging our cheeks and lining our eyes, making ourselves up, watchful of the other faces captured in the mirror. Who was seeing whom, that was the fluttery talk in that room, sound of voices bouncing off the tiles, feathery breath above powdered bosoms displayed like fruit the boys could only see, not touch. In the lobby smoking cigarettes, in the balconies hanging above the mezzanine, parts of me in the coffee shop in the corridors that went to the hotel. We ran when they brought us here as children, it was a castle climbing the grand staircase, leaning over the railing, watching the people mill around below. The gentle sound of the little gong struck with a padded mallet, three parts of me, three tones, calmly calling the audience back from intermission.
Elmer in his suspenders looking tall and grand, Tris slim and smiling, dark hair, eyes celluloid blue like a movie screen in the moment before it’s lit up with a film. Louise fawning, gaping, her dress full of flowers on her pallid body, breasts already jutting out, you couldn’t help but look. Parts of me scattered all over this place, the seats the same seats, plush velveteen, purple cushions swaying back. We rode the number 8 streetcar here by ourselves, on Saturdays just like this one, they’d never let kids do that now, never see them in one piece again. Tris and Elmer cracking peanut shells during the film, stifling a laugh. Louise aloof, above it all with her breasts heaving a sigh and glancing, her eyes disdainful. I could feel you, knew you were there, we were mixed together like the particles of light and dust from the broad beam of the projector dancing narrow at the top and then ever wider, advancing over the gaping pit of the mezzanine seats, broadening and dancing with dust until it filled the screen together.
They want us to come now for dinner in the grand ballroom above the theater, parts of me scattered here too. Dances they had, summer cotillions, proms in the spring, we never went to one together, never went but I saw you with others, felt you across the room, glancing, saying hello like we knew, we always had someone else between us. Even with Louise gone and off to college, first college girl in the family, her forehead high as her bosom, and now look at her. I never did it—I never let them, always saving myself for Tris, always keeping myself for him.
What if I saw him tonight—too many people, too many years gone by, could it ever be the same? People floating in the room like dust in the light, a mock Spanish village with a dome of high stars, blue evening tending to dusk, surrounding the same dance floor we used to use. They would never think to build such a lovely thing now, never spend the money to create something as lovely as this, and now they want to tear it down, destroy it. Pieces of me, parts of me they will destroy, tearing it down in three days. In three days it will be all gone, parts of me scattered all over the place.
Scanning the vast room, I cannot see his face, any face that means anything to me, all sallow and drawn, all withered and covered with splotches, so I am not the only one who has aged. What would he look like? All of us worse for wear, even this beautiful old building is, but better off than most of us. It still has a grandeur, that grandeur they used to build into things. Can it really be fifty years since the proms, the cotillions, the Saturday nickel movie shows, smoke wafting up in the lobby. There’s Margaret, yes Margaret Borden, her family ran the five and dime on Jefferson just down the way.
“Margaret Borden, is that you?”
“No, not Borden any more.” Smiling, eyes lifting up to see who I might be. “My name is Lentz, has been now for forty-seven years. Why, Amelia Geist, dear Lord, I remember you. How have you been? It’s so good to see you. My word, Burt, it’s Amelia Geist, come and say hello.”
He offers his hand, shaking mine and then he takes it up to his mouth and kisses it. Burt Lentz, a grade or two higher than us, maybe Louise’s age.
“Yes, of course,” he says. “I remember the Geists. How could I forget, Louise was in my class.
“Yes,” Margaret says, jealous of not so much me as the memory of Louise. Thank God she won’t be here. “Yes, I remember Louise.”
“She was a stunner,” he says. “A beauty. All the boys wanted to date her. So haughty though, and aloof. She was unattainable. My God, Louise Geist, whatever happened to her? Last I heard, she was off to college. Going to be an English professor someday, or a writer.” I want to tell them the memory of her is better than the truth, want to bring her down a peg finally, bring her down in the eyes of others. But no, it wouldn’t be right. Let them think what they will. That memory, that piece of her should still live at least in this building, this grand building.
“She’s doing very well. Married and living in the beautiful hills outside of Bremerton, a writer.”
“We always thought she would be a writer.”
“Yes,” I say, lying. I cannot bear to see this piece of her rent asunder. “Yes, she has been married,” not true, “married these many years and living happily, writing for magazines and journals.”
“How about you, Amelia? So good to see you. This place is still so wonderful.” Margaret smiling now that the subject has moved on from Louise. “We came all the way from Florida for this. Wouldn’t miss it for the world—such wonderful memories. What a shame they have to tear it down.”
Burt hooks his arm in Margaret’s and leads us to a table, playing the role of the stern, practical man. “Yes,” he says, “but it’s all for the better. This real estate is too valuable to have it taken up by an old theater nobody uses any more and an old folks home. They can put an office building here and generate a whole future revenue stream of rents. Now this place is generating nothing in terms of income or taxes for the city.”
I want to tell him how wrong he is. There are vacant buildings three blocks from here, why can’t they tear those down instead? But no, hold your lip Amelia, always holding your lip, always keeping things nice for others, deferring, letting them go about their business, their lives. Margaret wants to tell me about her life. She asked but never bothered t
o listen to mine.
“Seven grandchildren,” she says, bragging, a magical number. “We have them down to see us each year, as long as they keep coming. Retired in Ninety-three, fourteen years ago. Burt sold the business, and we moved where it’s warm.” She sees that my hands are empty except for the signet ring Karl left me, not a thing on my left hand. She places her hand on the linen tablecloth where I can’t help but see it, showing me what her life has been like, her hands fat like two loaves of bread burnished with spots, showing me the sun her skin has endured, showing me the ring embedded in the fat of her fourth finger, buried in flesh together with this man. Where are you Tris, where have you been? I’ve been frantic here.”
“What do you mean?” he says, resting the portfolio on top of the suitcase with the roller wheels, setting his things down, glad to be home. “I’ve been working. I was in Wichita, at a convention.”
“I called several times and you didn’t answer the phone.” She lays the paint brush on the rim of the can and bats a loose strand of hair away from her eyes. “I’ve been trying to reach you. I didn’t have any idea when you were getting back, and we have the contractors coming over today to tear out the deck. As a matter of fact, they’re here now.”
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