Delicate Edible Birds
Page 14
EVEN IN THAT FIRST hot flush I knew you were human, flawed. You had false front teeth, an annoying laugh, a streak of stupidity that made you once lose a pinky toe to frostbite and another time vote for Ross Perot. You became belligerent when soused, held half-baked convictions about politics, made messes (of clothes, of facts, of women), adored cooking but cooked inedibly, and from the beginning loved too-proud, too-angry, too-mean me. And that, in the tally of flaws, was one that even your friends tried to talk you out of.
She’s a tough cookie, they warned. She’s used to things we don’t have here.
You nodded gravely, then gave your crooked smile. I’m pretty tough, too, you said. I think I can tackle tough like Celie’s any day.
WE SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in bed. The whole world was indulgent, and we could hear the smiles in people’s voices when we called to abandon our responsibilities; the snowmobile store could be run by the boys there, my family was fine gathered in the house together without me. Stripped of almost everything, eating crackers and single-serve pudding with our fingers in the sheets, all we had left were our stories.
Mine were elaborate, and when I retold them I always changed them. Yours were simple and neat and didn’t change at all.
This is one of mine: I was out on a sailboat in Lake Tahoe with an old boyfriend. The wind died down, and as we were waiting for it to start up again, he told me that a famous diver, the one on all the documentaries, was hired to film the bottom of the lake. Nobody had ever done this before; it was too deep. The diver went down and came back up sooner than the people on the boat expected. When he hauled himself over the gunwale, he was pale and shaking and wouldn’t speak a word, but when they were at last on shore, he swore them to secrecy, then told them what he’d seen: all the victims of mob hits from the casinos, their feet in buckets of concrete, perfectly preserved by the cold down there. Dozens of them, in a tight space, no more than fifty feet by fifty. Some faces still frightened, frozen in quiet screams. Fat men in business suits, skinny men who looked like jockeys, one woman in a spangled dress, her hair shifting in the current. And this is what scared the diver the most: their hands were floating at breast-level, beseeching.
I told this story to scare you, I think, but instead you laughed. Urban legend, you said, resting your heavy head on my chest.
I believe it, I protested. When the wind rose and the boat was flying again over Lake Tahoe and the water was splashing everywhere, I screamed every time a drop hit me.
That’s your problem, you said. You have way too vivid an imagination. Now, let me tell you a real story.
Oh, goody, I said, a little smug: I was the one, after all, who once made an entire kindergarten class cry fat tears of sorrow for my own little mermaid.
You put your hand on my mouth to make me hush. Now, I saw you once in your Wisconsin phase, you said, when you came back to town for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass at the old Presbyterian church, lit up with the candles we were holding. You were with your family in front, and me and my family were in back, my cousin and me passing our traditional flask of bourbon under the hymnal. I look around, bored, and I see you there. Wearing this jacket with fur around the collar, holding the candle under your chin. One more inch and you burst into flame. So thin I could almost see through you. Then everything ends, we do the singing thing, blow out the candles, I was about to go talk to your parents and your brother, say hi to you, when you just walk by and I’m struck to stone. You looked sad, like you needed someone to just come along and make you happy. I took a good look at myself and knew I didn’t have what it took. So I let you walk away.
Oh, I said. That’s awful. Five years down the drain.
No, but, listen, you said, though I already was listening. Listen, if had I gone to say hello then, we wouldn’t be here now. Now we’re right, the timing’s right, but before we weren’t and it wasn’t. We were lucky, you said, turning your head and kissing my lowest rib, gently. Timing is everything.
In the window an icicle caught the sun and burst into a thousand shards of light on the walls. I watched it burn there, dripping. I said, Your story was better than mine.
AT THE END of that week, we emerged into the cold world blinking like newborns. In our absence, the village had been swaddled with thick snow. There was the first skim of ice stretched taut across the lake, a canvas waiting for the brush. When we crossed the crashing river, I couldn’t help myself, and said, Where a gluegold-brown marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
You looked at me. That’s so damn pretty, you said, and, for such a tough country boy, there were tears in your eyes. That’s the prettiest thing I ever heard, you said in such a voice that I couldn’t ever tell you the words weren’t mine.
WE WENT TO BOTH Thanksgiving dinners, the early one at your mother’s, with her frozen corn and box stuffing, the later one at my house, with homegrown Brussels sprouts and orange-nutmeg cranberry sauce. I preferred your mother’s. Over dessert, we settled on late May for the wedding.
Immediately, the fights began.
In December, I scratched off the bumper sticker on your truck that endorsed the worst president in American history.
In January, when we started building the house, though you tried to stick to my eco-structure mandate, I freaked out when I saw the workmen lowering a standard septic tank into the ground.
In February, I decided I wouldn’t take your name, even though your mother sobbed over the dishes about it and your father stomped around saying that your name was as good a name as any name in the dadblasted town, and they’d been here longer than some snooty people he could name and where do I get off saying his name wasn’t good enough, he would like to know that, he would like to dadblasted know that.
In March, we almost came to blows over something you said that I wasn’t supposed to hear, a joke at the bar involving terrorists and nuclear bombs. I, who had just come into the busy place, and had been about to put my hands over your eyes and plant a kiss on the back of your neck, stalked out of the bar, your friends looking away.
In April, in the height of wedding planning, we fought once a day.
Still, there was no other valve for everything building up inside us, and we always made up beautifully. You were kind. You had a certain delicacy that, when either of us was at the point of broaching a real darkness, allowed you to suddenly capitulate. Your face would pale and you’d nod once and say, Okay. You’re right. I would stare at you, disbelieving, the horrid thing I was just about to say still crawling on my tongue.
Stupid me. Those months, I thought your capitulation was weakness. I now know it was everyday kindness.
IT WASN’T EASY to come back to a little town when I was used to cities. Our hometown is tiny and obscure, an upstate village with a cheap-looking Main Street, cracked sidewalks, public buildings of brown brick and particleboard, weathered plastic wreaths on the neighbors’ doors. Townspeople gave me befuddled looks when I said I was staying: Really? they said. I saw my stock sink in their faces. The produce manager in the grocery store snorted at me when I suggested he start up an organic section, and when I looked at the sorry state of the conventional pears he had, I understood what he meant. I couldn’t find enough space in town to walk, and when I went into the hills where the dogs are never locked up and unused to pedestrians, I was attacked by a furiously droopy basset hound. I was impatient with the Saturday night choices: the movies thirty minutes away, or television, or a bar, or a board game. I felt like a teenager again, stifled and bored, without even the possibility of babysitting and snooping around in other people’s business. I attempted to have a storytelling hour at the library, but the time ticked by and not one child came, and the librarian muttered with a sideways glance that I shouldn’t be surprised: there was a high school basketball game that afternoon, after all.
Yet, as winter dribbled into spring, I found myself paying more attention to the tin
iest things: a crocus furling out of the ground, the way the two old women who sat in the diner from opening to closing greeted each other with only a wet sniff every day. Because I had nothing to do, I finally began to understand the rhythm of the village, its subtleties that I had been too impatient to recognize when I was young.
Are you happy here? my mother said once in April, pouring coffee into my cup. I don’t mean with him, she said, nodding toward the living room, where you and my father were shouting at some sports team thousands of miles away. But here?
I considered this, the bones of my hands warming against the mug. I said, slowly, I can feel the beginnings of happiness sort of seeping into me.
My mother nodded and looked out the window, though she couldn’t see anything through the downpour. She sighed and said, Oh, that damn rain.
IT HAD BEEN RAINING constantly since late February, and of course it rained at our wedding. In the receiving line, nearly everyone whispered into my ear, Rain on a bride means good luck, and kissed my cheek and went on to the buffet.
I didn’t care. I beamed. I’d had the flu for a week, but had taken nuclear doses of medicine and all night felt like I was floating. I danced and ate and drank, and when we came home to our new-smelling house, with the floors still unfinished and the walls still unpainted, you tossed aside the umbrella (we found it the next day halfway up a blue spruce), swooped me up into your arms, kicked open the door, and carried me over the threshold, to where it smelled of sawdust and plaster; you kicked the door shut behind us and carried me up the stairs and the rain on the roof was thrumming, and opened the door to the bedroom, the one room in the house you’d finished and furnished with castoffs from my parents’ house. Candles were aflame, and your florist father hadn’t held back, filling the room with ferns and lilac, lovely garlands across the walls, huge vases overflowing with greenery.
This was a surprise to you, too. You started and almost dropped me, then filled our new house with your honking laugh, populating it with an invisible skein of ducks, until I had to laugh, also, at your joy.
AND THEN, THE DENOUEMENT. One week and two days after the wedding, you were in your work clothes, crouching in the living room to put in a baseboard over the freshly painted walls. Outside it was raining, of course, but harder than it had rained for the past few months, so thickly we couldn’t see out the windows at all. I had squelched through the mud with eight sacks of groceries and had just finished putting them away in our cabinets.
My flu had redoubled: I saw the world through a feverish haze. I hadn’t slept in what felt like weeks and had reams of thank-you notes to write, never actually written. Exhausted, I put my head down on the counter and began to cry.
You heard and came in, alarmed. What? you said. What’s wrong?
I don’t know, I said. I’m just so sad here.
Here? you said, looking around with dismay. In this house?
In this whole goddamn town, I said. I’m so freaking sick of it. I hate it, I hate everything about it. Freaking small-minded people, fat stupid idiots.
You hate everything about this town, Celie?
Everything, I said, savagely. Everything. The stupid grocery store where they don’t even have portobello mushrooms. God forbid a freaking mango. God forbid an open mind. Only things they can think about here are sex and hunting and football. I hate it here.
You looked at me coldly, jaw tensed and eyes narrowed. I’m so sorry, Ms. Big-shot Storyteller. I guess it’s all my fault, you said, huh? Dragging you away from civilization?
I hated the coldness in your voice, what I took to be a sneer on your face.
Yes, it’s all your fault, I said. Hurt, I burned to hurt in turn.
And that was it, a petty quarrel when I was soaked and sick and overwhelmed.
You dropped the hammer on the ground, where it made a dent in the floor that’s still there; you went outside, leaving the door open to the wickedly driving rain. I couldn’t see the truck or hear it pull away, but I felt it. Later, I’d hear that mine had been the last car they’d let over the bridge on my trip home from the store. After me, the swollen river was too dangerous and they closed it off. I like to think I would have run after you had I remembered the policemen in the orange vests, the sacks of sand they were dragging, that I would have tried to chase down the truck, apologized. But I was sunk in my misery, my flu, my soaking clothes. When I had cried myself out, I stood and shut the door and went into the bedroom and took a long nap, only to awaken to the phone call almost exactly an hour later.
A RIDDLE: WHAT HAPPENS when a lake and a river both overflow their banks, forming a pond where the bridge should be? When an angry man drives too quickly away from his harpy wife, from the house he worked so hard to build for her, when he turns the bend and hits the water and hydroplanes? When the old red truck blasts into the stand of trees and a branch goes through the windshield, through the man’s chest; when, at the same time, his head hits first the steering wheel and then the seat back, hard? When, a half hour later, someone comes along and sees the wreck, and pulls the man from the red truck, with the branch still in his chest? When the ambulance arrives the long way, the bridge out, and wails off to the emergency room, and the doctors on staff are so worried about the stake through the lung and the loss of blood that they don’t do a CT scan for about eight hours, all the time it takes to extract the branch and bring the hysterical new wife in, and draw enough blood from the shaken family for a transfusion, for his blood type is hard to match, and there isn’t enough in the banks for him; and then, when he’s stable, they finally figure out that he is in the deepest sort of coma, a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, no eye-opening, no response to physical stimulus or verbal cues? What happens when the doctor puts up the results of the CT scan and his eyes narrow and he looks at the ghostly vision of the brain on the screen and claps his hand over his mouth? What would be the most fitting, apt, apposite diagnosis in this set of circumstances? The punch line at the end of the joke for a man at whose wedding a little more than one week earlier it had rained and rained and rained?
The answer: Hydrocephalus, of course.
I SAT IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM with the town around me, your family (father weeping, smelling of roses), your shaken buddies pale and trying to hold it in with whispered jokes and chewing tobacco, your mother blissed out on tranquilizers, my family a protective ring around me. My father was giving me the rundown on hydrocephalus in a whisper, and I was dry and dim and stupid, but drinking it in.
There is a fluid in the brain and spinal cord, my father said, called cerebrospinal fluid, which is constantly created throughout the day. Normally, this can be flushed by the body, but when someone has a hemorrhage that bleeds into the subarachnoid part of the brain, the fluids can’t drain, and so they build up pressure in the ventricles. The pressure can cause damage. The neurosurgeon, as soon as he gets here, is going do a procedure called an endoscopic third ventriculostomy. They put a hole in the ventricle and a shunt in the hole. The shunt drains the pressure. My father paused, and looked at me.
Will he be all right? I said. Will he be the same?
My father blinked rapidly and took off his glasses. He wiped them with his sleeve, and when he put them back on, he took my hand. I don’t know, he said, looking away. It’s too soon to know.
THE NEUROSURGEON DID HIS WORK late into that first night, until the sky was just turning the viscous gray of yet another rainy day. He was a tiny man who looked the way I thought a priest should look, ashy and stern and ascetic. He took my hand in his small, cool one, and pressed it.
I’ve done my best, he said. We’ll have to wait and see.
I looked through the little porthole and into the scrub room, where the nurses were wearily taking off their paper gowns and hats and masks. You were in there, I knew, tubes perforating your wounded flesh. My hand in the doctor’s shook, and I squeezed until I could feel my fingernails press into his soft skin.
Wake him up, I said. Make him wake up.
THE FIRST TWO DAYS in the hospital I couldn’t eat, though people pressed food on me. I put the cups of coffee and doughnuts and apples underneath my chair, and paced some more. I liked the harsh rasp of thirst in my throat, the way that it hurt every time I swallowed. My body soured and whenever I moved the smell would rise up in a wave and wash over me.
When your parents and I were at last allowed to go into the room and see you, I took a step inside and then turned around and around and around in a little circle on the floor. Your mother pushed past me and began a dovelike sobbing, hoo-ooh-ooh, sinking into a little chair, and your father walked back out of the room.
I went over to you and took your cold, stiff hand in my own. I kneaded it, staring down at the mass of purple and red and yellow and blue that they said was my husband, at the white bandages and the tubes sucking fluids out of you, putting other fluids in. That first visit I almost said nothing, although the nurse had told us we should talk to you, that it was possible you could hear. We sat there, your mother and I, until the end of the visiting hours.
When we were asked to leave, I leaned close. You didn’t smell like yourself; you smelled of gauze and something bitter and wet. I said, Damn you, and left that ugly little present in your ear.
IN THE MIDST OF EVERYTHING, I would go outside the hospital and the world would be swollen, juicy, runneling. The sky overhead a warm wet washcloth pressed to my brow, the trees lascivious with wet. Everywhere, the smell of things awakened; the fevered ground, the upswell of mud. Down the hill was the river, the breeding carp pushing against the dam’s concrete frame.