by Alice Adams
The facts of how she felt, and had felt for these past several weeks, had seemed to be lost in the shuffle. No one asked, and Dave, the obvious target for complaints, seemed to regard her remarks on that topic as just that—complaints. Also, even if anyone had wanted to hear her symptoms, Molly would have had some trouble articulating just what was wrong. How to describe a generalized malaise, a weakness, a heaviness everywhere, but especially in her head (could the golf ball weigh a lot?), and intense fatigue. She could not, and had given up trying.
In the late afternoon, in the year of drought—the last drought before the floods of the following year—sunlight mantled the hills south of San Francisco, golden and benign. To their left the huge flat bay shimmered, gold, and giant silver planes rose noisily, ceremoniously, from the overcrowded airport. And everywhere, on every side, new and expensive subdivisions: tomorrow’s slums.
“It’s hard not to enjoy a drought,” Molly contributed, breaking a silence.
Dave frowned. “You won’t when water’s rationed.”
And Molly thought, not for the first time: How badly, really, we get on. We can’t even discuss the weather. Which led her to the further, the truly depressing thought: I can’t get out of this just now. This goddam tumor, this fucking “CA” has anchored me.
Hallowed Mt. Watson Hospital was Spanish in design, acres of red-tiled roofs and stone arched corridors. Alien, and to Molly intimidating. In perfectly tended gardens, on this bright fall late afternoon, giant chrysanthemums of burnished gold stood steadfast among their oversized and unreal green-gray leaves. Endless gardens. Endless corridors. She could easily be lost in them, Molly thought, or confined, and never get out. She could end up caring for chrysanthemums, cautiously, carefully. Alone.
With some little trouble they came at last to the specified office, down many halls and turns.
Since she had been prepared as though for an audience with the Pope, Molly was a little surprised by the relative simplicity of the great Dr. Bill Donovan’s office, which could have been any doctor’s. There was the requisite giant glass-topped desk with its large and clearly very recent photo of what must be a second, trophy wife, a tousled, toothy young blonde with twin blonde babies. The framed diplomas and certificates.
Dr. Donovan too was blond, a large bluff man with the aggressively swaying walk of a football player—or a surgeon. Shaking hands heartily with both of them, saying to them collectively, “Call me Bill.” And then to Molly he said, as every doctor before him had said to her, in almost identical tones that mingled intelligent concern with condescension, “Well, young lady, what seems to be the trouble?”
As if they didn’t know. Had not been forewarned about the Great Green Golf Ball.
Dave, on the long drive home, was elated. “So lucky,” he said many times, as he had on the drive down to Mt. Watson, but now with even more emphasis. “So lucky, he’s just about to go off on a trip to Bermuda but he agreed to do it. I’m so glad I argued and wouldn’t just take the man he recommended. He may be very competent but Donovan’s done this same operation twenty-three times.”
Molly thought, Now he’s going to say that there’s no substitute for experience, and Dave did say just that—as her attention wandered off, and she looked out the window at the glistening dark reservoir, which reminded her of lakes in Maine, or New Hampshire.
The wonderful lucky news, on which Molly was feebly trying but wholly failing to focus, was that wonderful Dr. Donovan, “Bill,” was going to perform the requisite surgery on her head the following Monday. Molly knew that she should feel strongly in some way about this event—she should probably at least feel fear—but she did not. So far she had only reacted to the news that she, that they, would have to get up very early to get to the hospital by eight, to be prepped and ready for surgery. No breakfast and no dinner the night before.
Looking over and misinterpreting whatever expression Molly wore at that moment, Dave told her, “You mustn’t be frightened.” He reached to pat her nearest knee. “You’re really a brave good girl.”
Molly saw no point in arguing. And indeed how could she possibly explain to him that she might as well have already been anesthetized? She was drugged, she was out of it.
Given what she had been told by Dr. Stinger, that her chances for survival were one in four, it is odd (she much later thought) that she did not, before surgery, contemplate Death. But she did not, she could not; sheer inability, not avoidance, and not “denial,” made that thought—made all such thoughts—quite impossible. She could no more have contemplated death than she could have imagined the universe, or the Milky Way. Or God.
At no time did she clearly think, I might die. Or: What would it be like if I did?
TEN
Unlike Molly herself, Felicia was aware of a sudden, unreasoning dread as she approached her house, in the airport taxi. This was two days before Molly’s surgery, and Felicia thought, I’m frightened for Molly—suppose it doesn’t go well?
But then, in part because she could not bear another answer, she told herself that of course it would go well. Molly has the best possible care, and she is a healthy and relatively young woman.
But she, Felicia, in the early fall hazy twilight, was even afraid of her house. Afraid to get out of the cab and go in. To propitiate whatever was so scaring, she overtipped the driver—who did not seem to notice. A surly, dirty-blond curly-haired boy, he barely thanked her, and drove off, leaving Felicia to face her house alone. Standing there out in front, with her Seattle bags.
Still frightened, she thought that perhaps in her absence someone had broken in; it happened so often these days that it barely made the papers anymore, so you didn’t even know how often.
Telling herself that she was being ridiculous, and noting that at least she had progressed from serious preoperative concerns about Molly to the considerably less serious housebreak worries, she opened her front door. And saw that the house was exactly as she had left it: the same minor mess, a clutter of newspapers piled on her breakfast table, the empty coffee cup that she did not have time to wash out before the plane to Seattle. The slight, faint layer of house dust that an absence, an emptiness, brings. She walked through the house, seeing nothing amiss, and opened the back door that led out to the garden.
No changes there, and she stood for several minutes savoring the November smells of loamy earth and the slight bitterness of chrysanthemums, the sweet rot of fallen apples. The neighbor’s cat, who always looked more like a fox, with her wild brilliant eyes, flicked her beautiful brush of a tail in Felicia’s direction, before scurrying under a wall of ivy.
So much for the marvelous powers of intuition on which she had always prided herself, Felicia thought. And she thought again, At least my fear was not about Molly. I know she’ll be okay.
She turned back to the house, the hall, and she opened the door to her bedroom—in which, on the bedside table, there was an enormous vase, one of hers that she kept in the kitchen closet. And a giant sheaf—three dozen? four?—of yellow roses.
At which Felicia’s heart jolted, and her breath momentarily stopped in sheer panic. She thought, Sandy, and in that petrified instant she imagined him entering the house like an owner or a most intimate friend, with his own key. Going into the kitchen, the closet, and finding the vase that he knew was there. Taking it to the sink and turning on water, so domestic, and probably remembering what she had told him, that warm was best for roses. She could perfectly visualize his carrying the vase, quite heavy now, from the kitchen to her bedroom, the confident swagger of his walk somewhat thrown off by the weight. Smiling to himself, recalling her fondness for yellow roses. Even thinking, Now everything will be all right. Will be just as it was.
The fool! The jerk!
No card. Just her knowing that he knew she liked these roses best—and proving that he could still walk into her house.
She would have the locks changed tomorrow, and how very stupid not to have done that before! But there was st
ill the night to get through.
An hour later, though, with a glass of wine and a bowl of good vegetable soup from her freezer, Felicia was able to think, How nuts, to be terrorized by some flowers. Or even by Sandy, who could be a little irrational, certainly, but who was after all a respected, respectable doctor, who might scare her a little on purpose, but who would surely not do anything really crazy. Surely not do anything that would get him into public trouble.
While heating the soup and taking a first sip of wine, she had put in a call to Molly, who sounded okay. “No, Im not scared at all,” Molly said. “Actually I hardly think about it. It’s odd, but it seems so unreal. Surgery on my head? It makes me feel like Humpty-Dumpty. Listen, I have to go. Steak is being announced.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jesus, I really hate steak. No wonder I’m getting so thin.”
They both laughed, and hung up, as Felicia thought, Poor Molly, with so much of Dave.
She reflected too that it was odd, out of character though for Molly not to have asked, And how was Seattle? Will? And odd that she herself had not said: This sort of creepy thing just happened here. There were these flowers in my bedroom …
“The cabin” is how Will had referred to the house he owned north of Seattle, high up on a bluff above the sound, with a magnificent view of surf and rocks and a beach, which the house seemed designed to ignore. The only windows were small and very high up, the roof steep and sharply ridged.
Heedlessly, Felicia reacted; she said, “Good Lord, Will, such a fortress.” But as she was about to try to cover what instantly seemed tactless, she noticed that he looked pleased at her observation.
“The architect managed to do pretty much what I told him to do. And he agreed that you really can’t tell what’s out there in the woods these days.” Saying this, Will looked grim, very military, so that Felicia was sure he did not mean wild animals—and sure too that she would do better not to hear about whatever he did mean.
In fact, Will’s bearing was always military, though at first Felicia had simply seen him as very erect, with the perfect posture no doubt demanded by some school, some parent. Even in bed. Waking early in the morning, he sat upright as though in response to a bugle call.
Inside, this house was opulently dark. Dark leather chairs and sofas, wine-colored velvet draperies, dark walnut panelling hung with what had to be family portraits, ancient and somber, very rich people from at least a century ago.
Those ancestors and their implications were the first (and lesser, actually) surprise in terms of Will that Felicia observed in the course of that visit. Like most people who have always lived with a comfortable amount of money, Felicia assumed the same to be true of her friends, and she was always embarrassed and upset when it turned out that someone had grown up less than comfortably, in that way. In the course of things, except in her shelter work, she did not meet the genuinely poor. Curiously, the closest she had come was Raleigh Sanderson, who had angrily told her more than once, after more than enough martinis, “You’re so young! Your parents have really made it, you don’t even remember the Depression. I tell you, we were really scratching around back then.”
But Will, she recognized as they toured his “cabin,” was genuinely rich, and had been so for many generations. No doubt that was how he could afford to be a professor.
In Seattle she had not got this whiff of what her mother would have called real money—or, in Felicia’s view, worse—old money. “But no money is really real, and none of it’s very old,” Felicia had argued. “Oh, darling, you know what I mean.” And Felicia did know. Will’s apartment on the lake was pleasant enough, but spectacular only in its setting; it did not contain wonderful “things,” just a lot of books and shabby-comfortable chairs—what Felicia assumed to be standard-issue professorial gear.
She had also noticed a rather large number of much-enlarged news photos of military actions, including some bloodily bandaged Civil War soldiers—but she assumed that this had to do with history, what he taught, rather than with specifically military tastes. But in the cabin, she was ushered into what Will had said was his study—and there was a room (four walls, no windows) entirely lined with what at first she took to be replicas of guns, big toys, but she quickly understood that they were real, real guns in a variety of shapes and sizes, in walnut and silver and plain dark heavy metal, from very small, just a couple of inches long, to enormous. And all upright, erect in their green plush cases.
Ready for action.
“These aren’t loaded, are they?” she could not help asking.
“Of course not.” But he seemed curiously pleased at the question. “There’s only one loaded gun in the house, and I keep that hidden.”
That’s one too many, Felicia thought, and just managed not to say. “These are just for fun?” she asked.
“You could put it that way. I like to have them. To me they’re very beautiful.” His tone was a little defensive.
“… arsenal …” she could not help murmuring.
He snorted, unamused. “Some people would certainly call it that.”
“I think anyone would,” she said rather quietly. Anyone outside the NRA, was her further thought.
At dinner, though, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, she asked him, “You don’t actually belong to the NRA, do you?”
He smiled somewhat condescendingly. “Yes, actually I do. You see, as a historian, I happen to take the Second Amendment seriously.”
“Oh Jesus, Will …”
That night, in bed, after love, he whispered to her insistently, “This is what’s important. Love is. We may disagree on a lot of superficial issues …”
But guns are not superficial, Felicia was too sleepy to say. And she was less sure about love.
Unhappily, on the plane going back to San Francisco, as they flew over rich dark-green beautiful mountains, Felicia read in the morning paper about another shooting: a ten-year-old boy with his father’s supposedly unloaded gun shot his sister in the head, not killing her though “damaging” (wrecking) her brain. Not exactly the fault of the NRA, or certainly not Will, although in a sense Felicia felt that it was.
And so, although restored to her own house, her bedroom, from which she had removed the ominous, beautiful roses, Felicia did not fall easily to sleep. In her mind she was writing to Will: “I’m sorry, this may sound silly, but I am so turned off by guns. I really hate them, everything about them. It really comes to this, I just can’t have a relationship with someone in the N.R.A.”
And she was writing to Sandy: “Please, no more flowers.” No point in telling him about the changed locks. “The roses are beautiful, but—”
She must have eventually slept, for at some point in the dark of early morning she awoke to the sound of someone walking around in her garden. First the creak of her gate, and then the crunch of cautious steps on the gravel path. A faint tiny trickle of water: Christ, could someone be peeing there?
Panic froze her; she could neither move nor think. She imagined the person outside looking at her house; was that the point of his presence, to see her? Might it be someone who had watched the house and thought she was still away? Might he try to break in? Or if it was Sandy (her blood and pulses knew this to be the case), would he come in, with his key? How could he pee out there?
Cold in her warm, familiar bed, she lay there, until she realized that for a long time there had been no sound at all. That whoever (Sandy) had gone, and the sky was lightening.
After breakfast, in her sunny fall garden, there was no sign at all that anyone had been there—and so maybe no one had? But Felicia was sure that it had not been imaginary. She had clearly heard someone. Who peed.
“I know there’s no connection, Will and Sandy couldn’t be more different, really,” Felicia said to Molly, over lunchtime bowls of soup, at Molly’s. “It’s just that both of them have scared me lately, and I’m not a frightened person. But Sandy was so angry when he hit me, and then doing creepy things like sneaking
in flowers. And Will with all those guns.”
“Anyway, you got your locks changed?”
“Early this morning. You’d be amazed at how quickly they come and do it all. I guess they’re used to much worse emergencies than mine. It’s not a good sign.”
Molly did not seem to be drinking her soup, which must have cooled off by now. Every now and then, she brought a spoonful to her mouth, took a small listless sip, and returned it to the bowl. Her visible lack of appetite was painful to watch, especially for greedy Felicia. In fact Molly was visibly, painfully not herself; she was literally not all there, although from time to time she spoke, sounding more or less like herself. Now she said, as though considering, “I’m not afraid of Dave, I just can’t stand him, he’s suffocating, and he’s so unpleasant. But I don’t seem to get rid of him, so maybe I am afraid.”
“I don’t think you’re afraid. Jesus, Mol, you don’t feel well.”
“That’s certainly true—and having Dave around all the time—I really can’t wait for it all to be over. You know, Dave too.”
Although Molly was obviously thinner, she moved more heavily than before, as though her thin arms and legs were weighted in cement. At first Felicia had thought that Dave might have her on some cheer-up-don’t-feel drug, but then she decided that Molly was simply drugged with her own entire discomfort, which of course included Dave.
“It’s so complicated,” Molly went on. “He naturally thinks he’s being wonderful, and I guess in a way he is, which makes me feel very guilty. Along with everything else. He’s exactly like a parent. Like both parents. And he really hates the cats.”
“Yes.” Felicia wanted to say, Look, just get rid of him, and I’ll do everything. I’ll bring you home from the hospital and move in here with you and make nice meals. Later on, she decided that she should have said exactly that, and not only said it but put it into effect—forced it, if necessary. But at the time she was too intimidated, less by Dave himself than by the fact of his being a doctor; she was unable not to think that maybe Molly should be with a doctor now, and how lucky in a way that Dave should be one. That he should be so nuts about Molly. “We both have to get away from doctors,” she told Molly, laughing a little.