by W. S. Penn
Grandfather posed quietly beside my bed-head, where he had been for most of the last several days—except when Elanna or Sara were shoveling Jell-o and broth at me. He had left only to shower, and once to go out and buy white construction paper and magic markers which he used to entertain himself, making “For Sale” signs for the Plymouth. Every time I had tried to say that I would buy the Plymouth, he had interrupted me with a slow and convincing shake of his head.
I didn’t resent uncle’s intrusion into this last afternoon. I didn’t even resent the wordless intrusion of the Vegomatic. But needless to say we were all relieved when, after her fifth trip to the nurses’ station, the Vegomatic stood and adjusted the huge bowtie of her blouse and walked to the door, where she waited a few moments for uncle to notice that the visit was over. Finally, she uttered a syllable which sounded a lot like “Hilt” and, though reluctantly like a recalcitrant puppy, uncle left with her. Only after she left did I realize what had been making my head sting and my eyes dizzy. It was the invisible but palpable cloud of her perfume.
“Boy,” Sara said. “Now I know why you always called her the Vegomatic. She could slice you up quicker than a carrot.”
“She’s about as much fun as a Treaty,” I said to Sara.
“That’s cruel,” Elanna protested. “Her life with him hasn’t been exactly what you would call easy.”
“Maybe,” I said, “But it’s the plain and simple truth.”
“There,” Grandfather said, holding up the “For Sale” signs.
That evening, Louis Applegate came to fetch Grandfather, staying long enough to watch the fluid sucked from the side of my head by “Harry” drip into the tank on the machine. Elanna and Sara left with them. Eric was upstairs for the eleventh attempt at removing the growths on his feet; Duwayne and Choyswan had vanished; and I felt a profound emptiness invade the room. Yet I also felt profoundly contented. Maybe it was because the emptiness was only temporary—soon enough, I’d be able to rejoin the Tompsons and Sara, sooner than expected, according to Dr. Weinstein, who was pleased with the way my will to get out of the hospital had accelerated the rate of healing.
“Never,” Weinstein had said more than once, “have I seen anyone who healed as quickly as you. Are you sure you’re not a lizard?”
Maybe the contentment was due as well to the feeling that Elanna and Sara, like Grandfather, were still there with me and would always be there when I needed them whether they lived or died. I don’t really care how it’s put. Contentedness, unlike pain, doesn’t need analysis because you don’t need to get over it.
After Grandfather left to return to Chosposi, I sat propped up in my bed, my blank book and Montblanc in my hands, and wrote. I could not yet remember all I’d seen in the land of sodium pentothal, but I didn’t worry. I simply enjoyed the feel of the pen’s nib on the paper, the same way I enjoyed the colored lights that began to play on the fountain outside as the sky darkened, or the food when dinner was brought round, and even helping the nurses spoonfeed Eric when he was brought back to the ward.
Dr. Weinstein came early the next morning to check the amount and color of the fluid in “Harry’s” tank.
“Feeling lonely?” he asked, wrapping the blood pressure gauge around my bicep and pumping it up.
“No.”
“Fine,” he said, releasing the pressure. “I think in another day or two we’ll consider releasing you. I had honestly expected you to be here several weeks, but there’s no real reason.” He poked and adjusted the bandage that covered the right side of my head, into which the tube attached to “Harry” disappeared. “So what are your plans after you check out?”
“I thought I’d visit father for a day or two, drop by mother’s, and then head on back to Clearmont. If that’s okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “Any doctor can change the bandages. You know a doctor in Clearmont?”
“Dr. Satherwaite at the college’s clinic.”
“Good. I’ll have the nurses draw up a schedule for checking and changing the bandage. You can give a copy to Dr. Satherwaite.” He stood up. “Guess I won’t be seeing too much of you unless some problem crops up. You’ve been a good patient, Alley, and considering the fact that the tumor was the size and shape of a pear, you’re coming along very well. We won’t know how badly the nerves in the side of your face were damaged for at least five or six months. I’d like you to drop in for a quick check around next October, if you can. I like to see the results of my work.”
“I’ll make a point of it.”
“Any Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, at my office. You don’t need an appointment. I can fit you in for the time it will take.” He rolled the curtain separating my bed from Eric’s back. “I have to tell you, Alley, that I’ve rarely seen love and concern expressed so many different ways for one human being. Did anyone tell you that Sara was so frantic by the fifth hour of the operation that we had to sedate her and send her back to her motel with your sister? Partly our fault, I guess. We had no way of knowing it’d take that long.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“And your aunt. The nurses tell me she used to be a nurse, herself?”
“Yeah, in a V.A. hospital.”
“When she saw you yesterday, what with the pump and the bandages, she was so upset that she kept going into the restroom and throwing up.” He laughed. “I tell you, you’re a lucky man,” he said, “in case you don’t already know that.”
“It can happen that way,” I said.
“Well. See you.”
“Take it easy,” I said, feeling my former contentedness begin to expand to incorporate the novelty of the Vego … my aunt … caring so much about what happened to me.
50.
If I suffered pain during that time, it was only twice, and in retrospect even the pain felt good in its way. It let me know I was alive. The first time was when, after waking up, the nurse had breezily brought in a bedpan and the lingering effects of mother’s toilet training made it impossible for me to pee into it while I was in bed. Like all institutions meant to serve people and not human beings, hospitals cannot tolerate a change of the rules. So the nurse gave me a shot that made the muscles around my bladder contract. Though the cramps hurt, I still couldn’t pee. Three shots later, convulsed by cramps that could bend the fender of a car, I was writhing about, hoping for something fun to happen—like the nurse bringing in leeches to bleed me. Finally, while the nurse was out preparing a fourth shot, I unplugged “Harry” and wheeled him like a robot to the bathroom where I relived all the pleasures in the history of pissing.
The nurse was furious, chasing me down as I took “Harry” for a brief stroll down to the day room. Only after I loomed over her, threatening to wreak havoc on the hospital, did she agree to telephone Weinstein and obtain his permission for me to unplug “Harry” and wheel him around with me when necessity called. “Harry” and I stood beside the nurse’s station as she phoned, and I could hear Dr. Weinstein laugh.
The second painful moment was the day the doctor released me. Early in the morning, as planned, he came to sever the umbilical cord between me and my pal “Harry” by pulling out the hard plastic syringe on the end of the rubber tubing around which the flesh had begun to heal. First, Dr. Weinstein raised and fixed the metal railings on either side of the bed.
“What are those for?” I asked.
“I’ve been straight with you up to now, haven’t I?” he said. “There’s only one way to remove the tube and that’s to yank it out. I’ll tell you, it is going to hurt, probably like nothing you have ever felt before. It won’t hurt a long time, but you’re going to feel it since the tissue has grown attached to it.”
“As long as you don’t make me use a bedpan,” I said.
Lacking his usual good humor which he had used with me, he said, “I want you to roll over toward the window and take hold of the bars with both hands and concentrate on something pleasant.”
I rolled over and put my hands on the bars and thought of
Sara.
“You ready?” he asked. Before I could answer, he had taken a good grip on the end of the tube and yanked it out and then grabbed my waist and held it down on the bed. He waited as my knuckles turned pale and I tried to tear the bars from the bed. A collage of yellows and reds and purples pasted on the back of my eyeballs.
It seemed minutes before he said, “Well?” and I could answer, “You really know how to grab a guy’s attention, don’t you?”
“Look at it this way,” Dr. Weinstein said, “now you have an absolute by which to measure all other pains.”
“What,” I asked, “is pain?”
It felt wonderful to be outside the hospital. Hospital air is sterile and filtered, and for a boy raised in the City of Angels where the air has tangible mass it’s a little like trying to breathe at 20,000 feet. So, as I climbed into father’s car, the air was heady and intoxicating and I felt as though I was learning to breathe all over again.
I stayed on father’s hide-a-bed for three days. During the day when he was at work, I began to try to write down what it was I had seen in the dark interiors of my semi-coma and, failing at that, took long walks with Sabina, the puppy he had purchased to replace Running Dog, whom I renamed Spotted Tail because of her markings of an Australian Shepherd. Palo Alto had changed in the short time I’d lived away. The Tall Tree, its landmark near the park, was little more than an upright trunk, its branches withered and its needles thinned by the exhaust from the cars that went to and fro on the main road nearby. On the second day, I answered the phone while father showered, and a woman’s voice began to talk to me as though I were my father, asking how his son was. It was a pleasant voice, even though she was not a little embarrassed when I explained that I was the son.
“Nice of you to ask, though,” I said. “I’ll have him call you when he’s out of the shower.”
Father wanted to explain when I told him his lady friend had called, even though he needn’t have. I was happy that he had someone. His inability to say whatever words he felt were needed brought him to the old recollection of how we’d never been able to talk to each other.
“It’s all my fault,” he said. “I was always too busy while you were growing up. And your mother …”
“Dad,” I interrupted him. “I’ll make a deal with you. Let’s go fifty-fifty on the blame bit, okay?”
On the third day, I screwed up my humor and went by mother’s house. Pressing the buzzer on the intercom speaker outside the door caused a set of spotlights to flash on, blinding me. I waited.
“Who goes there?” a voice said over the speaker. It wasn’t mother or even a feminine voice. Neither was it convincingly masculine, but more generic like a monk’s or priest’s voice after years in the cloister, and I spoke to the speaker as I would have to a priest, with a certain formality.
“It is I,” I said. “I’ve come to visit my mother.” I could feel the cover on the peephole slide back and I knew I was being observed.
“Well, so it is,” the voice said. “You.”
Absurdly, the door’s hinges imitated a low-grade horror film, squeaking slowly as the door was opened. Short, with tiny sandled feet, and pale to the point of translucence, He stood there in a brown robe tied at the waist by a cord.
“It’s you,” I said. “What are you doing here? Where’s all your Indian jewelry? Where’s your hardhat with the light on the front?”
His voice was higher than over the speaker but still without gender as He said, “I live here, now.”
“You’re mother’s lodger?”
He nodded, grinning that toothy grin of his. “So what are you doing here? You don’t belong here. We’re even Steven. I don’t owe you a thing, anymore.”
“I told you, I came to visit my mother,” I replied calmly, beginning to recall just the sketchiest details of what I’d seen in the womb of sodium pentothal.
“She’s not home. And I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“Do you know where she is?” He nodded, but said nothing. “Well, where?”
“With her lawyer.”
“Changing her will again, huh? May I leave her a message?”
“If you wish,” He said. Behind Him in the hall I could make out the winged figure of Mercury that He had removed from the hood of His customized van.
“I see you still have Mercury,” I said.
“Is that your message?”
“You know it isn’t,” I said. “Tell my mother that I am all right. Tell her I’ve gone back to Clearmont to the Tompsons’ and if she wants, she can reach me there.” I started to go and stopped. Whether I was jealous of Him or merely unwilling to concede to Him easily, I don’t know. “What the hell,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell her I love her for me.”
“Will do,” He said, “if you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“Enjoy her cooking,” I said as maliciously as possible.
“I like it,” He said.
“You would.” I could feel the points of His beady little eyes on my back as I walked away down the driveway. When He called out, “Hey, Albert! See you soon!” I didn’t even turn around. I didn’t need to see His expression to know what He meant and to connect it with the “For Sale” signs Grandfather had so carefully made.
51.
Pamela used to say to me, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” and even as a child I knew she was wrong. Not knowing worried me much more than knowing and ignorance had contained the constant threat of injury since the day I unscrewed Grandfather’s power saw looking for the baggy containing the sawdust. Not knowing seemed to be a raw wound that only needed to be touched accidentally to hurt. What I didn’t know as I returned to Clearmont was what I had seen in the five post-operative days of bobbing between life and death. It would take the death of Grandfather before I would be able to take proper stock of that.
At first, both the Tompsons and Sara were disturbed by the way I looked. With a large bandage covering my head from jaw to crown and cheek to nape and the paralysis which made me look as though I was sneering or that my face was asymmetrically lopsided, I was even a bit frightening to myself. The tumor had lodged below the focus of nerves entering that side of my face, and the nerves had been so damaged as to make my eyelid remain open while the eyeball rolled back and up whenever I tried to close my eyes—giving me a one-eyed stare of whiteness.
Nonetheless, they all became used to it. The Tompsons chuckled when I drooled like someone overdosed on novocaine. With a humor that I appreciated, Sara liked to have me “close” my eyes at parties, after people were inebriated enough fully to appreciate the effects of my stare. I obliged. Even after the bandages came off and my head simply looked as though it were listing to one side, the stare remained available for our mutual entertainment.
After several months, the nerves recouped enough to half-close the eyelid. In doing so, however, the nerves seemed to confuse themselves and with a playfulness of their own decided that the right side of my face should sweat profusely whenever I chewed food or gum. Sweat dripping from my chin was less amusing, and I gave up gum.
By that time, Sara and I had moved into a studio apartment in the married students’ housing of the college (the power of the Proctor helped, as we weren’t yet married) with the blessing of both the Tompsons and Professor Quinin. I had gotten a job setting type for the local paper. Actually, it was the third of three successive jobs. Each of the first two I lost because of my efforts to unionize non-union shops.
“Proof positive,” Proctor Tompson said proudly, “that failure is often a better teacher than success. I wonder if you didn’t learn more from me in that class than the rest of the students combined.”
I had. But then unions to me were a lot like tribes and, though I lacked a specific tribe, the instinct for them was fierce in me.
The jobs supported us while Sara finished out the term. We enjoyed having the Tompsons to dinner and despite the lists of equal chores that some women made men read and
sign like the Magna Carta, Sara became an excellent cook. I, preferring to stay behind the scenes, became a fair dishwasher, and I took pleasure in finding a new wine or cognac for the Tompsons to try when they came.
In June, we had a party for Doctor Quinin. He had successfully defended the footnotes of his dissertation and received the college’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, which meant there would never be anything at all offensive or thought-provoking in his lectures. It was at the party that I realized that Quinin had already set his sights on being a Dean and I told Sara that he would succeed because of his adroit way of mindlessly conforming.
“He only needs tassels on his loafers, argyle socks, and a pink shirt and he’s there,” I said.
That led to our first fight, during which I explained that to me it seemed odd how white people were promoted in direct inversion to their wisdom. Sara accused me of being white, which I ignored. She only said it to wound me.
“Have you ever seen an Indian Dean?” I asked her, laughing, and she said no, but she’d seen Indians be chiefs, and I said that was the point, that chiefs were such because the tribe respected their wisdom, which wasn’t true anymore for Deans or Majors or Senators or Presidents.
She countered by trying to hurt me through Grandfather, asking why he hadn’t been a chief, then. She was assuming that wisdom meant that one would want to be a chief, whereas wisdom does the opposite.
“I don’t agree,” she said, becoming adamant.
I tried to explain. “Wisdom means that if leadership is thrust upon you, you may accept it even though you don’t want it; not wanting it means you will accept it with a sense of the responsibility and care thrust upon you. Whites seem to have become just the opposite. Every little boy dreams of becoming president, doesn’t he?”
She still didn’t buy it. I was beginning to wonder where her insistent refusal to entertain the idea came from.
“A chief must be wise,” I said, “but not all wise men have to be chiefs.”
“Well,” Sara said petulantly, “maybe you should marry an Indian,” and in the illogic of her petulance I saw what was bothering her.