by Ann Packer
“I took them a casserole.”
I smiled. “Did you try to pass it off as homemade?”
“Very funny—it was.” She was watching me, her head tilted slightly. It seemed she was trying to decide whether or not to tell me something.
“What?” I said.
“I think she’s concerned about you. That you’re writing him off, although she didn’t put it that way.”
I thought of Mrs. Mayer’s pale face, the watchful way she’d looked at me over tea the other morning. I tried to focus on the fabrics. For a moment sewing seemed like the saddest of enterprises, a world of hope embodied in the clean rolls of fabric, when all you’d really get would be a new slipcover, a new throw pillow for your same old bed.
“Are you?” my mother said carefully, and I wondered what she was thinking, if somewhere deep inside she was hoping I was. Not writing him off, maybe, but thinking of some kind of ending. I’d never thought she wholly approved of him—of my settling with anyone so early. She never said anything, but I saw it in her reticence on the subject, in the way she was always so nice to him, as if she were waiting him out. I figured if she did disapprove the reason was her own wrecked marriage: not that she wouldn’t want me to succeed where she’d failed, but that she’d fear her failure had planted the seeds for mine and would want to protect me from that.
I hadn’t said a word to her about the rocky state of things that had existed between me and Mike before the accident. I hadn’t said a word to anyone.
“No,” I said, looking back at her. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so.” She reached to touch a blue-and-white harlequin print. “I told her to worry about her own feelings and let you worry about yours.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, not in so many words, silly. I was a good PTA mom, don’t worry.”
A “PTA mom” was code for the exact kind of mother my mother wasn’t. A PTA mom baked chocolate cupcakes and iced them with orange frosting for the class’s Halloween party. My mother sent me to school with a giant can of Hawaiian Punch.
“So what kind of casserole was it?”
“Chicken and mushroom. You know, cooking is kind of fun, I’d forgotten.”
“Is this the beginning of a new trend? The Working Woman Who Still Has Time for Her Home?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Anyway, you’re making the curtains, not me.”
I shrugged: I’d finished the linen jacket the night before and I needed another project, simple as that. “True,” I said, “but they’re not for my home.”
“You’re not going to move back in with me one of these days? Don’t break my heart.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
She looked serious all at once. “That’s all right, you know. It really is.”
“I know.”
She tilted her head, a concerned look on her face. “Do you have plans for the afternoon?”
“Lunch with Jamie. Then the hospital.”
She nodded slowly. She hesitated for a moment, then put her arms around me and pulled me close.
Jamie still lived in Miffland, the student ghetto near campus, and to get there from my mother’s I had to drive right by the corner I’d always thought of as the breakdown corner. Not once but twice my Toyota had died right outside Hank’s Shoe Repair, and both times Mike had come and fiddled with it to get it running again—the second time in his suit, because he was already working at the bank by then. It was my first time driving by since the accident, and I gripped the wheel until I was well into the next block.
Miffland was full of large, wood-frame houses rented nearly to ruin, with scrabbly front yards and overgrown lilacs everywhere. It was a neighborhood where certain houses maintained reputations for decades and more: the dopers’ house on the corner of Mifflin and Broom, someone might say in passing, and although the dopers you knew who’d lived there were long gone, six more just like them had taken up residence and were carrying the torch.
I found Jamie sitting on her sloping front porch in a flowered bikini top and cutoffs, her dark blond hair pinned high off her neck. Five or six guys lounged on the second-story porch of the place next door, a house famous for the bright yellow color someone had painted it long ago, faded now to a dirty ocher and peeling so badly you could see the light blue underneath. The guys were on aluminum lounge chairs, sitting in front of a pair of giant speakers that had been set face-out on the sills of someone’s bedroom windows. Gangsta rap blasted from them: “something something bitch,” I heard as I made my way up Jamie’s walk.
“Nice neighbors,” I said as I sat down next to her. “When are you going to move?”
She laughed. “They’re not bad. They’ll be sophomores next year and they just escaped from the dorms. They keep coming over and asking to borrow, you know, sponges. I don’t think they’re very likely to use them.”
I glanced up at the guys. “Probably not.”
She set her glass down and looked at me. “So?”
I shrugged. “Nothing new.”
“Are you OK?”
I shrugged again.
She picked up her glass and took a long sip. “See the one in the yellow T-shirt?”
I looked up at the guys: the one in the yellow T-shirt was looking down at us. “Yeah.”
“He seems pretty cool.”
“Cool?” I said. “Don’t you mean hunky?”
“What is he, a candy bar?” She smiled. “Just a little smarter than the average nineteen-year-old was all I meant.”
“Liar.”
“Oh, leave me alone. Go get us some food, why don’t you? And I’ll have another of these.” She handed me her glass, and I headed for the front door.
Inside, the living room was dark and musty. Jamie’s roommate lay on a tired gold velvet couch, still in her nightgown, the phone at her side and the receiver pressed to her ear. As I passed by she looked up but didn’t acknowledge me. Her fiancé was in Los Angeles, in business school, and they talked every Wednesday night and every Saturday morning. On the first of each month he FTDed her a dozen red roses.
In the refrigerator I found a container of potato salad and a bowl of tuna, and I put them on an old bamboo tray, then added a box of crackers. I refilled Jamie’s glass with iced tea and got myself some.
“They’re having a party tonight,” she announced when I got back outside.
“Who?”
“Those guys.” She gestured with her head at the neighbors. “They just called down and told me.” She forked tuna onto a cracker. “What do you think? It might be good for you.”
I smiled. “Not that you have any desire to go yourself.”
“Carrie.”
I looked at her. We’d been friends for eighteen years—best friends, we used to say, until it was too obvious to mention. I knew she wanted to go to the party, but only if I’d go, too.
“What’s his name?” I said.
“I think it’s Drew.”
“You think.”
“What I think is that it would be good for you to get out.”
“As long as it’s just for me,” I said with a smile.
“I’m serious.” She shifted her chair so her back was to the guys. “No more teasing, OK?”
I shrugged. “OK.” I looked up at the guys again. Yellow T-shirt sat with his legs splayed, a beer can in hand, moving a little self-consciously to the beat of the music. I felt as if I knew, or could guess, everything about him.
“He’s nineteen,” she said—more, I thought, to herself than to me.
“Well, maybe we should fix him up with Julie Mayer. She’s nineteen, too.”
She shook her head. “No way. Julie probably wants some guy with black boots and a goatee. Sensitive but moody. An artist, or maybe some guy in a band. A beautiful face and long, thin fingers.”
“Who doesn’t? Where is this person?”
“I don’t. God, what a pain. And neither do you, Carrie—do you?”
I didn’t
answer.
“Do you?” she said again.
“It sounds a lot better than what I’ve got—a vegetable.” I turned away and buried my face in my hands. How could I have said such a thing? How could I have thought it? After a moment I felt Jamie touch my shoulder.
“You didn’t say that.”
I looked up at her. “But I did.”
She turned away sharply, and I felt a flash of rage at her. I wanted to prod her, make her call me on what I’d said, but when she looked back it was gone, she’d completely erased it.
“Care?” she said gently. “Do you want me to go to the hospital with you this afternoon? I could just wait in the lounge if you want to see him alone, and then afterward I’d be there if you felt like talking.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“You can call me any time, you know,” she said, frowning a little. “In the middle of the night or whenever.”
“I know.”
We sat in silence. I was just thinking of making an excuse to leave when she spoke again: “Was Roommate Dearest still on the phone?”
“Glued to it.”
“Oh, honey,” she said in a syrupy voice. “Roses. How—how original.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Uh uh, Todd’s boring. I just hope she never figures that out.”
“Not as boring as talking about him.”
She shrugged.
“For that matter, why do we always have to talk about guys? That’s boring. I mean, here we are, we’re smart, we must have something more we can talk about. Politics or books or the weather or something.”
“How about men,” she joked, but she looked hurt.
“Men are just guys with bad haircuts.”
We both smiled, and there was my opportunity to leave. I set my glass on the tray and stood up. “I’ve got to get going,” I said. “Thanks for lunch.”
“Will you go tonight?”
I sighed. Sometimes, standing with Jamie at some party, or even just following her into a bar, I felt years too old for what I was doing, like a chaperone who’d rather be home in bed reading.
“I’m working till ten,” she said. “Meet me here at ten-thirty and we’ll do tequila shots first.”
“I’ll pass on the shots,” I said. “But I’ll come.” I stood up and held out my hand, and after a moment she covered my palm with her own. I headed for my car. I was parked facing the wrong way, and when I pulled into her driveway to turn around, I saw that she’d already repositioned her chair so she could be seen by the guy in the yellow T-shirt.
The hospital was crowded. Saturday afternoon, and people milled around, big multigenerational groups of them standing in clumps outside the gift shop, lining up at the florist’s to buy stiff arrangements of carnations and baby’s breath. I wandered past the cafeteria and looked in. GET WELL SOON read a Mylar balloon tied to a chair at an empty table. A heavy smell of gravy came from the kitchen. In one of the lobbies I sat on a tweedy couch and ended up staying for half an hour, thinking every minute that now I’d go. I counted five little boys with casts on their arms before I finally stood up.
On Mike’s floor the blond nurse named Joan stood talking to Mr. and Mrs. Mayer. They were at the other end of the corridor from the elevator, standing in front of a glass-encased fire extinguisher. I started to duck down a hallway, but Mrs. Mayer looked up and saw me. “Carrie,” she called, “the most wonderful news! Joan thinks Michael is going to wake up soon!”
“Actually …” Joan began, but Mrs. Mayer ignored her. She’d been wringing her sweater as if it were a wet towel, and now she tucked it under one arm, came and took hold of my elbow, and started walking me toward Mike’s room.
“Joan’s worked with a lot of head injuries,” she said, “dozens of head injuries, and she’s seen people with the exact same thing as Mike who just woke up one day and were—well, practically fine.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “His neck—”
But she wasn’t listening. “It all comes down to you and me, Carrie, because women are stronger. Do you understand? It takes strength to have hope.” Abruptly she stopped walking and stared into my eyes. “Being hopeless is easy, Carrie. And you know who it hurts? Mike, that’s who!” She shook her finger at me. “It hurts Mike! You don’t believe me, but it’s true.”
Mr. Mayer came up and took her hand. “It’s OK, Jan,” he said. “It’s OK.” He looked at me, and an agreement of some kind passed between us, that soothing her was all that mattered right now. He said, “It’s all right, Carrie. We’re going out to Sears now before they close. We’ll leave you to visit with Mike by yourself.”
Mrs. Mayer looked hard at me while Mr. Mayer took her sweater and shook it, then draped it over her shoulders. Watching them walk away, I thought I’d never seen her so disturbed.
Joan came up and gave me an apologetic look. “My fault,” she said. “I mentioned a boy we had in here last year who—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Mike’s room was cold. His room was cold, his hands were cold, his feet were cold. Like on winter nights when he’d stay over: when he came back to bed from a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom, he’d hold his feet away from me, his knees, his frozen hands. But if I got up he’d let me touch him with my cold toes, he’d hold my feet between his legs to warm them. “So cold,” he’d say, and he’d pull me close until I felt him all along the length of my body.
I stood at the foot of his bed. Next to the wall there was a slice of space a couple of feet wide, wide enough for a sleeping bag, and for a moment I imagined myself moving in, just a nightgown and a toothbrush and some sad bribe for the nurses. We had never even gotten to live together, never even gotten to try it. Why had the prospect deflated? Why had I begun to cool?
I looked at him. I wanted to see everything there was to see, his arms slack at his sides, his closed eyes. One tube ran into his nose to feed him while another entered a bandage on his throat and brought him air. Two more went into his forearms, and under the cloth draped over his middle he was hooked to a catheter. Filling him and emptying him. They even shaved him, although not every day, and looking closer I saw that it had been three or four days: his beard was coming in striped by a surprising blond. Eight and a half years and I had never wondered how he would look with a beard, never wanted him to look any different at all. I had never really wanted him to be different. It was only myself who was wrong, who had changed somehow, become wrong—for him. For us.
CHAPTER 4
State Street was the center of Madison, a half-mile run of shops and restaurants that connected the university to the State Capitol. Closed to all traffic but buses, it was Madison’s boulevard, its town square—the place you’d go when you didn’t know where else to go. On Wednesday, done with work at five, I trudged past shop window after shop window, hungry for clothes, CDs, shoes, books—for things that I wanted to buy more than have. The sidewalks were crowded with UW students and high school kids, skateboarders flying by. I passed the street guitarist who played bad James Taylor, then the one who played bad Bob Dylan. I was in a funk, struggling over whether or not to call Jamie: Saturday night I’d backed out of going to the party at her neighbors’ house, and we’d fought on the phone, a sullen exchange of resentments until, in a troubled voice, she said, “What’s with you?,” a question that I knew pertained not just to the present moment but to months and months.
I could have been honest with her. I could have said: I don’t know. Something. Help me. But I didn’t. Instead I asked her how she could even wonder such a thing, and we both hung up furious. That we still hadn’t talked four days later was just about unheard of in our friendship, and as I walked I felt gloomy with guilt, certain I should call but equally certain I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to: didn’t want to hear whether she’d gone to the party anyway; didn’t want to hear about whatever had or hadn’t happened with Drew, which would be exactly like something that had or hadn’t
happened with half a dozen other guys from her recent past.
After a while I came to Fabrications. It was the only boutiquey fabric store in town and it had prices to match, but I loved it, loved going in to wander among the Liberty cottons, to stand in awe before the wall of silks in the back. It was a quiet store, rarely populated by more than one other customer. I’d never bought more than a spool of thread.
From the sidewalk I looked in the window. There was a sleeveless blue dress hanging there, beautifully simple, with a square neckline and a nipped-in waist. The envelope for the pattern had been pinned to one shoulder, a Vogue pattern I’d used once. Through the window I couldn’t really tell what the fabric was like, so I went inside and reached over the display ledge for a touch: it felt like silky tissue paper.
I turned around. The store was empty, not even a salesperson in sight, just bolt after bolt of gorgeous fabric. I breathed in deeply. Places like House of Fabrics and the Sewing Center smelled harsh from all the sizing, all the manmade fibers, but in Fabrications the only smell came from a bowl of potpourri on the counter at the cash register, its contents changed with the seasons. I crossed the store and looked into the bowl. Today it held dried peach pits, sprigs of rosemary, and slivers of a fragrant, spicy wood.
From the back room someone coughed, and I left the counter and approached the silks, columns of them on swinging arms. I found the blue of the dress and reached for the tag: thirty dollars a yard. At that price all I could make was a sash.
Yet I didn’t turn away. The silks were exquisite: shiny satins and shimmering jacquards; colors clearer than cotton could ever be, subtler than wool. A pale gray shadow stripe suggested a coat dress with a notched collar; a brilliant black and red and gold print some kind of fluid pantsuit with a black camisole underneath. Who knew where you’d wear such a thing, it would be enough just to get the fabric home and touch it, work with it, be surrounded by it for a while.
Reluctantly I turned and left the store, the question of what to do next filling me with anxiety. Then I thought of Mike’s brother, scooping ice cream a block farther up the street, and although I had no idea whether he’d be working or not, I headed that way.