by Jeanne Ray
“I compressed some vertebrae. It’s hardly a broken back.”
“It’s a break in a bone in your back.”
“That’s a very small technicality.”
I smiled. “Listen to us arguing. We’re finally living together.”
“It was the only way I could think of to weasel my way into your house so you wouldn’t throw me out.”
“You know, I think I won’t go into work today. I think I should stay home with you.”
“Oh no,” Romeo said.
“Really, Tony and Sandy can manage one store, and Alan and Raymond will cover the other one. They’ll be fine. How often do I get to spend the day alone with you?”
“What a sad waste. A day in the house alone with you, and all I can do is stare at the ceiling and swallow pain pills.”
“Our relationship isn’t built entirely on sex. It’s mostly built on sex, of course, but we’re perfectly capable of talking, too.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
In retrospect, this was a very funny conversation. Did I really think that going to work was a possibility? Romeo could only move his arms. Probably he could hold a piece of the newspaper, carefully prefolded, directly above his face and read it. He could hold a glass that was handed to him, but really, that was about it. He needed me, and I do not mean that in the romantic sense of, “Oh, he needs me.” I mean that the man I love had just about the same ability to look after himself as a six-week-old baby.
“I’m going to take a quick shower,” I said.
“That’s great. If I could just get one more pill from you before you go?”
How could I have forgotten the pill? I fumbled with the childproof top, which took a little bit of muscle to push down and turn, a complete impossibility for the back-injured. “I’m so sorry! It’s right here.” I dropped one down his open gullet and held the straw near his mouth.
He swallowed and gave a weak smile. “And one more thing, I hate to ask…”
“Anything.”
“If I could just brush my teeth.”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t brush them last night and, well…”
“I’ll go get the equipment.”
I ran into the bathroom and looked under the sink in the big shoe box where I keep things like extra toothbrushes, where I always had extra toothbrushes, where there were no extra toothbrushes to be found. I picked up my own pink Oral-B, which was ever so slightly frayed around the outer bristles, and considered the limitations of love. I held it under hot running water, put on some toothpaste, picked up another glass, and strolled brightly into the bedroom.
“I think I can do this,” he said. I handed him the brush, hoping that no questions would be asked. He guided it very gingerly toward his mouth. Then he swiped the brush gently over the surface of the enamel, wincing slightly from time to time. He was dusting his teeth, not scrubbing them.
“Do you want me to do that?”
He spoke carefully, his mouth full of toothpaste, and little clumps of foam formed at the corners. “It’s just that the back ones are a little far away right now.”
I picked up the brush and went in. I have brushed plenty of teeth in my day that were not in my own mouth. I pulled up his lip with one finger and went up and down. I told him to open, to stick out his tongue, to take a drink of water from the bendy straw and spit.
But we had not properly accounted for the spitting. After a few swishes he just looked at me, his cheeks blown out and his lips bunched tight. He looked like an unhappy blowfish waiting for guidance. Spitting involved sitting up, or else one of those suction devices the dentists slip into the side of your mouth that were strong enough to vacuum out your fillings. I didn’t have one of those.
“Okay,” I said, “one second.” I ran back into the bathroom, grabbed two hand towels, and stuffed one on either side of his neck. “Spit it up.”
He just looked at me. I could tell he was thinking about swallowing. “If you swallow, it will just make you sick. Now spit.”
His eyes turned back toward the glass, and he pointed. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. “The glass?” He closed his eyes. “The straw?” And his eyes brightened. I stuck the straw between his lips and he blew the toothpaste liquid back into the glass, proving once and for all that he was a genius.
“That was a low point,” he said.
“Do you want me to floss?” I meant it as a joke, though I realize there is nothing particularly funny about flossing.
“Would you?” he said, his voice welling with tenderness and disbelief.
There was not a shower for me after all. Once the teeth were clean there were bathroom issues to address, then a careful sponge bath. I had a pair of white cotton pajamas with tiny pink roses on them, roses so tiny that they might have passed for pink footballs if you didn’t look too closely, and with some real effort I was able to get him into those.
Then he admitted he was hungry, having missed dinner last night and, honestly, lunch as well, and a cheese omelet would be perfect with some buttered wheat toast. We both agreed that cereal on one’s back would be pretty much out of the question; and a cup of coffee, if it was just warm and wouldn’t melt the straw, would make all the difference in the world. I couldn’t have been happier to do it, and he couldn’t have been nicer in asking.
“Wow, we’re having omelets for breakfast?” Little Tony said, setting his pile of school books down on the kitchen table.
I did not miss a beat. “That’s right,” I said, heading back to the refrigerator for more eggs. There was time. Romeo wasn’t going anywhere. I neatly folded the one I had in the pan and slid it onto the plate, and gave it to Tony tucked between four neat triangles of toast.
Little Tony looked at his plate, then looked at me. He blinked. “Wow,” he said again, though this time it was softer.
Sarah made her entrance into the kitchen just as the second one was coming up, and though I needed to get upstairs, I couldn’t see how I could make an omelet for her brother, then point her toward the cereal box. I set the second one down in front of her.
She picked up her fork and very gently touched the top to see if it was real. “Thank you,” she said. No sarcasm, no jokes.
The children were so touched, so nearly speechless at the sight of a hot meal in the morning, that I felt like I had been a seriously bad grandmother indeed. It wouldn’t kill me to send them out into the cold world with something more sustaining than a bowl of Cheerios under their tiny belts.
“Grandma, are you going to the grocery store today?” Sarah asked casually.
I seemed to wind up at the grocery store nearly every day of my life. It called to me like upstream called to a salmon. I asked her what she needed.
“Just a lottery ticket. Just one. I need a Big Game Mega Millions.”
Her brother rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you ever play the Mass Millions? The odds are better.”
“It’s small-time,” she said.
“It’s 7 million dollars.”
“Mega Millions is 47 million. You aren’t very good at math.”
“I’m better at math than you are.”
“Kids, please,” I said. I poured more eggs into the still-hot pan.
Sarah pushed a slip of paper in my direction. “I wrote my numbers down.”
“Everybody knows your numbers,” Tony said.
“I told your mother I wouldn’t buy you any more tickets,” I said. “Besides, Nora just got you a dozen.”
“They were quick picks. They weren’t my numbers.”
I had planned to be firm in my resolve, but when Big Tony walked into the room I snatched up the slip of paper and stuck it in my pocket, not wanting him to see that we were even discussing it. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I bought her one more. It was only a dollar, after all.
Big Tony had appeared at the very moment omelet number three was flopped onto the plate. His timing was so flawless I had to wonder if he hadn’t been pushed fro
m the wings by some unseen stagehand. I was feeling less sanguine about the whole egg preparation business. His plate hit the table with something of a clatter while I picked up the children’s dishes and ferried them back to the sink. I went back to the refrigerator and took the last two eggs from their cardboard nest. Inappropriately, I thought of Nora, so many eggs. Sandy rushed into the room in a flurry of getting ready to go but she stopped, hopeful, and said, “Eggs?”
I am ashamed to say I raised my butter knife. “No! I only have two left, and they’re not for you.”
“Bad night?” she said, artfully lifting one eyebrow. She quickly assembled the kids’ peanut butter sandwiches, folding over one piece of slathered bread and eating it for breakfast while she worked.
The coffee had reached lukewarm perfection as I managed one last omelet, this one low on cheese but perfectly rendered. I put a place mat and cloth napkin on a cookie sheet, the way the girls used to do for me on Mother’s Day when they were tiny. I was taking Romeo breakfast in bed for the first time since we had been together, and damn the circumstances, I wanted it to be nice. I had the eggs, the toast, and coffee, a miniature glass of juice, the salt and pepper shakers. In a perfect world there would have been a single rosebud in a vase, but if the cobblers’ children had no shoes, the florists’ certainly had no flowers.
Sandy had applied grape jelly to bread and sealed the sandwiches in their plastic bags and paper bags. She looked at the clock in panic.
“I don’t want to leave you with such a mess,” she said.
“It’s my mess. Go. You’re a sweet kid. Tomorrow I’ll cook you breakfast.”
She leaned over and kissed me, then in another minute she had marshaled the troops out the door. Sarah turned back and waved good-bye. Then she winked at me, just like Shirley Temple.
I left the dishes behind and sailed up the stairs on a cloud of good intentions. I would sit beside my love and cut up the eggs held together by yellow cheese, and feed them to him one bite at a time.
“I’m sorry it took me so long, but there were some kids who cut ahead of you in line,” I said.
But no one said anything back.
“Romeo?”
Eat first, then the pain pill—that was the lesson I learned for the future. Romeo and his clean teeth were out cold, and there would be no waking him. I wanted to show him what I had done, the heartbreaking sincerity of food on a tray. But then I realized there would be more food on more trays in the very near future, and I set the tray down on the floor and ate.
Chapter Six
SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, MOTHERS HAVE tried to figure out how it is possible for something as small as a baby to create such a black hole in space. How does a mammal the size of an average Jack Russell terrier generate six loads of laundry a day? How is it possible that their slightest discomfort can wipe out every trace of logic, forcing you to call your pediatrician at 3:00 A.M. to report the fact that your baby is sniffling? How can they take every ounce of your mental and physical energy when they can’t scoot two inches on their own?
When I was pregnant with Nora I bought French tapes, thinking that since I had all this time at home, I could finally master the language that had earned me a C my junior year of high school. In fact, the reality of motherhood left no time for vocabulary words and the conjugation of irregular verbs whatsoever. Once my baby was born, I felt a shining sense of accomplishment the weeks I managed to lug the trash out to the curb.
Having a man with a compressed vertebra in my bed proved not so dissimilar an experience. There was no squalling, of course, and it was a real time saver to have him be able to tell me what he wanted when he wanted it, but other than that, I was working like crazy to keep up. I was up and down those wicked stairs a hundred times a day, taking up sandwiches and heating pads and ice packs and various pills, bringing down trays and plates and glasses and finished crossword puzzles and bundles of wash.
“You’re a real angel,” he said to me, staring up at my ceiling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanted to say, feeling cranky and tired. “It’s not a problem.” Then I leaned over and kissed his forehead.
When, on the fifth day after what I thought of as Romeo’s “accident,” my need to complain started to feel reckless, I did what any sensible woman would do: I took the cordless phone outside, sat down on the chilly back steps that overlooked my garbage cans, and called my best friend. With Gloria I was free to wallow in self-pity for as long as I wanted, without having to endure the unpleasant aftertaste of guilt that comes from making a scene.
“Do you still love him?” Gloria asked.
I sighed, exasperated. It was such a trick of Gloria’s, throwing out an impossibly worst-case scenario to defuse the crisis at hand with perspective. “Of course I still love him. I probably love him more.”
“You’re just tired,” she said.
“Very tired.”
“And you aren’t having any sex.”
“It’s a privilege I lost once I broke his back.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t see anybody else there.”
“So this is penance?”
Penance. I hadn’t thought of it that way. It was a very Catholic concept. Was it possible that all my work was simply paying off the damage I had done?
“I guess that could be it. I’m not saying Romeo is asking me to do all the things I’m doing. Most of it comes from me. He really tries very hard not to be too demanding.”
“When Buzz had his heart attack, he started asking me to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. He told me he wanted to drink mango juice in the morning. He said he had to have ESPN on, even when he was asleep.”
“Oh God, it’s nothing like that.” I looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot. “Maybe I’m just frustrated because having him around makes me realize how much I wish I did live with him.” I hadn’t admitted this to Romeo. I hadn’t even really admitted it to myself. Despite the constant running around, I really liked having him there. I wanted to keep him.
“I guess you could always compress another one of his vertebrae.”
“No, seriously. With Sandy and Tony and the kids and all of Romeo’s family, sometimes I think this is the only chance we’re ever going to have to live together. It makes me feel…I don’t know—”
“Wistful.”
“Exactly.” Gloria had an annoying habit of finishing my sentences but sometimes she did a better job of it than I would have, anyway.
“Speaking of Sandy and the kids, tell Sarah I’ll drop her lottery tickets by sometime tomorrow.”
“Her lottery tickets?”
“She called and asked me to pick them up for her. She said everybody at home was so busy with Romeo that she didn’t want to bother anyone. Isn’t that cute? She’s so grown-up on the telephone.”
“How many did she ask you for?”
“Just two,” Gloria said. “But I got her three. They’re only a dollar.”
“Sandy told us…” I started, but then I saw there really wasn’t any point.
“Don’t worry about Sandy. You should be concentrating on Romeo. The man you love is helpless in your bed. Seize the day!”
Living with a person changes things. After three years of feeling very close to Romeo, I suddenly realized I had never really known him at all. You may think you speak the language, but until you actually live in the country you’re just playing around. Romeo liked hot things hot and cold things cold. Plenty of ice in everything, including orange juice. He liked to watch the Today Show in the morning and seemed particularly smitten with the wide-eyed female host, though he denied it. He preferred the Times to the Globe, slept in socks, and hummed along with any piece of Beethoven that came on the radio. He woke up cheerful in the morning, even when under the influence of various pharmaceuticals. He slept with his mouth wide-open at night but did not snore.
But the main thing I came to realize about Romeo was that he was a very popular guy. All
day long, the doorbell rang. Dominic came first thing in the morning and often showed up again on his way home from work. During the early visit (and I do mean early; he often arrived just after six) he always comported himself in a very doctorly fashion, asking Romeo questions about his pain levels, moving his arms and legs around, and listening to his heart.
“Why are you listening to his heart?” I asked, somewhat alarmed in my fuddle of sleepiness. “Is there something wrong with his heart, too?”
Dominic folded up the stethoscope and shrugged. “Just a habit.”
When Dominic returned in the evenings, after the dinner dishes were loaded into the dishwasher, Romeo’s back never seemed to cross his mind. He just sat on the edge of the bed drinking a gin and tonic, talking about baseball.
“Who talks about baseball in October?” I asked Romeo.
“Dominic thinks that’s when the real game is going on. People get lined up for trades. Decisions get made that affect the whole next season.”
Often Father Al would come along with his brother, either in the morning or at night, and pull up the little chair beside the bed and give Romeo communion whether he wanted it or not. If for some reason he missed his ride with Dominic, he showed up alone later on. “I just thought I should check in on him,” he’d say almost sheepishly when I opened the door.
There seemed to be a certain sense of competition between the two brothers over who got more of Romeo’s attention, in the same way there seemed to be a bit of jockeying among Romeo’s sons, who dropped by in a continual stream. One would just be waving good-bye and here came another one marching up the stairs, like guards at Buckingham Palace swapping off their watch. Did they worry about leaving him alone with me too long?
Raymond, the only single Cacciamani son, brought over his digital camera and held it directly over his father’s face to show him pictures of the different floral arrangements he’d made that day. “I’m really moving the little sweetheart roses,” he said. “The supplier messed up and sent us a double shipment this week, so I’m putting them in everything.”