Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  “You have to keep track, Charmaine. But it might not make much difference. I’ve never been regular.” Phoebe brings her hands to either side of her face and draws her cheeks down with her fingertips, dragging her lower eyelids open to reveal the red rims underneath. I look away.

  “Go sit on the toilet and take your shirt off.” She drops her hands, and the skin on her face reshapes itself slowly.

  “What? Why?”

  “You heard me. I’ll be in in a second.” Phoebe stands and starts running water in a pan. I fold the dinette against the wall, stalling. She puts the pan on the burner and turns it on.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Go take your shirt off,” she says. “Bra too.”

  “Nothing hurts,” I say. “I don’t need you to do anything.”

  “Charmaine, I don’t have the energy for a fight.”

  I step into the bathroom and pull the accordion door shut behind me.

  “Leave that,” Phoebe says, but I keep it shut. I sit down on the lid of the tiny toilet and peel my shirt off. It’s the nipples, sore against everything, but it’s also the rest of my breasts: they’re heavy, and there’s a tightness, like whatever’s inside is growing too fast for my skin. When I release my bra, it’s only a small relief.

  I listen to the water starting to boil. After a time, Phoebe switches off the burner. Then she is there, collapsing the accordion door with her foot, a dishtowel in one hand and the pot of hot water in the other.

  I cover my breasts with my hands.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Phoebe says. She settles the pot into the sink and dips the dishcloth in it. “Take away your hands.”

  I won’t. She stirs the dishtowel into the hot water, then picks it out gingerly. She wrings it out over the pot, sucking in little gasps of air, it’s so hot on her fingers. Steam rises.

  “Take away your hands,” she says again, crouching in front of me. “This will help.”

  “But nothing hurts,” I say, keeping my hands where they are. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “At your stage of development, calcium builds up in your breasts if you don’t use compresses.”

  “Calcium?”

  “Calcium, caffeine,” she says. “All kinds of things.” She pulls my left hand away and then she is touching me, probing the underside of my breast with her fingers. “Hard as a rock. We need to break up some of that mass.”

  “Stop,” I say. “Please. The mass is okay.” I don’t even know what she’s talking about—a mass.

  She covers my left breast with the dishtowel. It’s so hot that tears come to my eyes.

  “I can do it,” I say, blowing out air through my teeth. “Let me do it myself.” But then she begins to knead my breast with her fingers, through the towel, and I want her to stop. I want her to stop. I long again for tessering, like in the book, disappearing into another time and space. Titus has been approaching the bathroom with curiosity, and now he sits carefully outside the narrow doorway, watching.

  While she does this, Phoebe stares into the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. “I’m getting old, Charmaine.” She takes away the cloth and again probes my naked left breast, which has turned a deep pink from the heat. I press my teeth together. I don’t want to look at her this close up while she’s doing such a thing. “If you didn’t know how old I was,” she says, “what would you guess? Thirty?”

  “I can do the other one,” I say, clapping my left hand over my left breast, wishing I had an extra hand to reach for my shirt. “Thank you. Thank you for showing me.”

  “Stop it,” she says. She pries my right hand away from my right breast. The bathroom is just big enough for our bodies. She is breathing in my exhales, and I am breathing in hers. Even the words of my prayer don’t have room to surface in here, though I close my eyes and rummage around for them, desperately, in my head.

  She holds the hot, wet towel to my right breast and pushes my hand away from the left one. Now she is squeezing both at the same time, harder and harder. “I think I could pass for thirty, still,” she says. And then something weird happens, because I can still feel her hands and I can still hear her, but it’s as though there’s a bunch of parts of me, like there are parts of the body of Christ, and all the parts of me are climbing up my neck and into my head, like water’s rising and we have to move to higher ground. We’re all crowded up there together, watching what’s happening right underneath our chin. Now I can pray again, but I am careful not to move my lips.

  “When you see your father tomorrow, I don’t want you to be alarmed,” she says, and it’s as if the words come at me from far, far below.

  I make a small sound in the back of my throat.

  “It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. He looks a little different from the last time you saw him. He’s a little puffy from the new medication. In funny places, like his neck. And he doesn’t have quite the same . . .” She takes her right hand off my breast and flaps it around her mouth as if encouraging the right word to come forth. “I don’t know, Charmaine. He’s just not quite the same. They’ve got him on something very strong. I just want you to be prepared.”

  “I’m prepared,” I say, though I may or may not be. Phoebe makes a big deal about some things that turn out to be okay, and the things she thinks are no big deal, like her hands on my breasts, are awful in ways she can’t even imagine.

  “They’ve got him on ‘mood stabilizers.’ So his mood is very stable, I guess, and that’s what everyone wants. But he looks bad. Tired. And he doesn’t communicate well. He’s working on a pair of moccasins for you, though. Sewing them himself. The doctor says it’s good for his motor skills.”

  Then both of her hands are gone. “There.” says Phoebe. All the parts of my body that have gathered up into my head drop back to their regular places. I grab my shirt and hold it in front of me. She stands up, blocking the light, and sighs. “Go ahead and act like I’m killing you, Charmaine, but you can’t tell me that doesn’t feel better.”

  Chapter 10

  IT’S DR. OSBORNE’S TOYOTA that pulls up to school Wednesday. I’m standing out front, and I keep on standing there until Phoebe rolls down the passenger window and tells me to get in.

  “The Pinto’s back in the shop,” she says. “Just for an overnight.”

  “You couldn’t borrow the Buick?” I say, not moving toward the car.

  “Doctor Osborne offered, which was very thoughtful,” Phoebe says tightly, “and in return you’re being very rude.”

  Inside Dr. Osborne’s car, all the books have been piled on the floor behind the driver’s seat. I sling the butt purse in first, then pull the door shut behind me, harder than I have to. Dr. Osborne nods at me as if he knows enough not to say hello out loud.

  “Charmaine hasn’t seen her father in more than two weeks,” Phoebe says. Her voice is too cheerful for what she’s saying, which means she’s nervous. “She’s really looking forward to this. I was just explaining to Doctor Osborne that your father’s finally stabilized. It’s hard to find just the right medication.”

  “A tricky business,” says Dr. Osborne, like he knows all about it.

  I stare out the window at the row of waiting buses. I have wanted to see my father, but it doesn’t feel right to be going with Dr. Osborne. I wish myself on the bus, even sitting with Tracy, even with the threat of Cecil Goode, headed on our slow rural route down to the river. Instead, we take the road to Clay’s Corner and then pick up a short stretch of highway to Exit 22, which takes us right into the late-afternoon sun. Phoebe and Dr. Osborne flip down their visors at exactly the same time. They say nothing, which bothers me more than the talking. It’s as if they’ve already made themselves comfortable around each other.

  We pass field after field of mid-harvest tobacco left to dry in long rows of teepees. Then we drive deep into the thoroughbred farms on the far city side of the county, where horses stand near each other, stepping gracefully, bowing to eat grass. We pass the sign for t
he county west of Rowland, Beacon County, and shortly after that, Phoebe points and says, “There,” and we pull into a long, winding drive for one of the prettiest brick buildings I’ve ever seen. It sits up on a knoll. It doesn’t look like a hospital at all. It looks like an old plantation home, with six white pillars out front and an overhanging roof on the side, also propped up by pillars, and when we drive through the side place, a man comes out and waits so he can park Dr. Osborne’s car.

  “This is a porte-cochère,” Phoebe says, as the three of us watch the Toyota disappear around back of the house. All you can see, from where we stand, are green fields divided into horse pastures by white split-top fences. Every single tree too is ringed by its own tiny white fence, as if lassoed there, so that the horses can’t scratch themselves on the tree bark the way they like to. These kinds of horse farms probably hire a man just to go around scratching horses all day, whenever one of them has an itch.

  “Where do you want me, Phoebe?” Dr. Osborne asks, extra politely.

  “There’s the nicest lobby,” she says, pressing a button by the heavy wooden door. When a buzzer sounds, she pushes open the door and we enter what looks like a rich person’s living room, with brown leather sofas and an oriental carpet. Part of the room is a reception area, with a woman in glasses sitting behind a low counter. Next to the reception area, double doors are propped open onto a long, brightly lit hallway, where a nurse in blue waves to Phoebe.

  “I’m sorry about the wait,” Phoebe says to Dr. Osborne. “Charmaine, I’ll go in first then come get you.”

  Dr. Osborne and I take seats at the opposite end of a long leather sofa. He’s wearing his cross of nails, which dangles between his knees as he leans forward to pick through the brochures on the coffee table. Residential Recovery. Mood Disorders. Manic Depression. Abundant Living. He offers me the one on manic depression. It has the theater masks on the front of it, the happy and sad faces, and at first I think that’s why he chose it and that we might be about to start talking about his series of spiritual scenes. But what he says, as I hold the flyer, is “The treatment has come a long way.”

  I’ve never heard of manic depression, but I know what both words mean. Dr. Osborne’s eyes are on me, though, so I don’t open the pamphlet.

  “How’re you two holding up down there at the river?” he asks.

  “Fine.”

  “Your mom’s got a lot on her plate.”

  I stare down at the pamphlet, at the masks with the empty eyes. I do not want to look at this man while he tells me things about my own mother like he knows her better than I do. Or about my father. Manic depression.

  Dr. Osborne sighs and sits back. “I’ve been thinking about my next play, Charmaine. Seth and I are going to perform some David and Absalom material in November, and then maybe I’ll get started writing another script. Maybe you and your mother could be my Ruth and Naomi.”

  I don’t like the way he says “my” Ruth and Naomi, like the characters and the people who play them all belong to him.

  “My father could write the script,” I say. “He’s a very good writer.”

  “I’ve read some of his work in The Good Word,” says Dr. Osborne.

  “You’ve known him for a long time,” I say, testing. “You’re friends with him.”

  “We grew up together,” Dr. Osborne says.

  I don’t care for the way Dr. Osborne neither confirms nor denies anything I say.

  “What are you a doctor of?” I ask him.

  Dr. Osborne matches his hands fingertip to fingertip. “I have a doctorate of education,” he says, “which I acquired in another life.” He’s speaking like there’s an important mystery behind what he’s not saying, like he enjoys the fact that he knows it and I don’t.

  “And now you teach at the seminary,” I say.

  “I do.”

  “And direct plays,” I say.

  “And direct plays.”

  “And help people out,” I say.

  Dr. Osborne presses his palms together and narrows his eyes at me. They are a dim blue, with pleated skin at the outer edges. “It’s true that I don’t mind helping out when someone needs it. I feel called to that service, actually.”

  I place the Manic Depression pamphlet back on the coffee table, and he spies the pen marks on my thumb. The earliest ones have faded, but altogether they make three rows of tracks that go from the heel of my thumb to the tip of it. I take my pen from the butt purse and start a fourth row at the bottom of my palm. Inhabit me, O Lord God. I’m still forgetting most of the time, but I’m also remembering the forgetting, since I can’t ignore my own hands.

  “What’s that you’re keeping track of?” Dr. Osborne says.

  “It’s between me and my dad,” I say, tucking my hand underneath my leg. “And me and God.”

  “You must miss your father,” says Dr. Osborne. “Seth’s father has to be out on the road fundraising while they’re on furlough. He misses his father, too.”

  “So you asked Seth to be in a play,” I say, “since his father’s away fundraising. And you’re asking me to be in a play, and my mother too, since my father’s in”—I check the pamphlet on the table, the one with the picture of the outside of this same house on the front—“residential recovery.”

  “I believe the play was your idea,” Dr. Osborne says.

  “My father is a man after God’s own heart.”

  “So people say.”

  “People say you should have gotten married.”

  Dr. Osborne sits up straight, and the cross of nails slaps back onto his chest. He tilts his head to the side, which makes him look curious and unkind.

  “My grandmother has your number,” I tell him.

  “Hah,” Dr. Osborne says, opening his mouth wide. But it’s not really a laugh. Over in the corner, the receptionist looks up. “Daze Peake,” he says, with some defeat. “Hah.”

  I’d like to rip her name right out of that mouth.

  “Don’t talk to me about her,” I say. “Or my father. You’re not friends with him. And don’t talk to me about my mother, either. You’ve never even known a woman. Nobody needs your help.” Then I am on my feet and across the lobby before he can get out another word.

  “Hold on a sec,” says the woman behind the desk, but I keep on going, right through the double doors and down the long, bright hallway to the old winding staircase at the end. I sprint up the steps, my breasts jiggling painfully. At the top I slow down. No one’s following me. Another hallway, identical to the one on the first floor, takes me back toward the front of the house. From somewhere comes a sound of muffled crying, deep and hopeless, without any highs and lows. A sound that seems like it could go on forever.

  At the end of the hall I push open more double doors to a huge, gleaming white room. The floorboards, the walls, the window casings—all white. Even the baby grand piano is white lacquer. All the sofas and chairs—and the room seems full of sofas and chairs—have white slipcovers. It’s big and blank and dazzling. Like heaven, maybe. Through deep windows the sun blazes as it sets. It’s so quiet in here that everything you can see and hear separates into itself. The low, distant crying. The shushing sound of Phoebe, crossing her stockinged legs where she sits on one of the sofas along the wall. In all this white her blue shirt is a blast of color. The light brown sports coat of the man beside her only seems dingy, like a shadow.

  “That’s her,” Phoebe says to him, and the man gets to his feet. He is tall, with a loose neck cinched in by a tight collar and tie.

  “Charmaine, I’m Doctor Phillips,” he says.

  “Where’s my father?”

  “I told her she’d be seeing him,” Phoebe says to the doctor.

  “I understand,” says the doctor. “Unfortunately he’s not up for anything like that today.”

  “I don’t need him to do anything, though. There’s nothing he has to be up for.”

  “We’ll try again Monday,” Phoebe says.

  I stand in front
of the sofa, my back to the windows, and the room takes on a lavender cast. The ceilings are very high. It feels like I might have landed on another planet, the way the girl in the book does when she tries to rescue her father by traveling via the wrinkle in time. She gets accidentally sent through the “Dark Thing,” which may or may not be a black hole, and she finds herself squeezed into a flat, two-dimensional atmosphere on a planet where she can barely breathe. Somewhere far away, the person crying goes on and on.

  “We’re making some medication adjustments,” the doctor says. “Do you know what a seizure is?”

  “He had a seizure this afternoon,” says Phoebe, speaking at the same time as the doctor.

  “He was responding well to a medicine we call Haldol, and today we had a setback,” says the doctor. “We’re trying something new, but it will take a while for him to even out.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t be taking any medicine,” I say. “He says it doesn’t feel right. He says he can’t hear the voice of God. And you’re making him cry.”

  “I hear the crying, too,” says the doctor. “But that’s not your father.”

  I know, in my stomach, that it is.

  “Charmaine,” says the doctor. “Will you imagine something for me?”

  I nod because I want to hear what he’ll say next, not because I have any intention of imagining anything I don’t want to. Not in this crazy white room.

  “What if most of your life you understood yourself to be one kind of thing. A cat, say. Every time you looked in the mirror, you’d see a cat. You cleaned yourself like a cat, acted like a cat—everything. Being a cat felt normal.”

  “Like Titus,” Phoebe chimes in, as if I need an example of a cat.

  “And then one day someone told you there was something wrong with your eyes. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, though, and when you had them fixed and you looked in the mirror, you didn’t see a cat anymore. You saw a dog. And you’d always been a dog, only you hadn’t been able to see it. So now you know that feeling like a cat wasn’t real, even if it seemed that way. Or you might feel that the new thing you see in the mirror is wrong, because it’s not how you know yourself. So that what’s accurate, like how you’re really a dog, feels inaccurate at first, because you have known yourself to be a cat.”