by Ann Packer
I looked at the machine.
“Carrie, I know you’re there. I’ve been getting a busy signal for the last five minutes, so I know you’re there. What is going on? Why haven’t you called me back? I’ve left like twenty messages on this stupid machine. Pick up.”
It was Jamie. I so much didn’t want to talk to her at that moment that it felt visceral, like a physical aversion.
“OK, I’m coming over,” she said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I crossed the room and forced myself to pick up the receiver. “Hi.”
“What’s going on?” she exclaimed. “Everyone’s worried sick about you. I just talked to your mom and she’s having a cow—she’ll probably pull up outside your house any minute now. Viktor called her tonight and told her you haven’t been at work since Monday.”
“Well, I haven’t,” I said. “So what?”
“So what? Are you sick? Is it because of Rooster going to the library on Monday?”
I held the phone away from my ear. Why did everyone know so much about me? I hated the notion that they were talking about me behind my back, figuring me out. “I’ve just been out of circulation for a few days,” I said at last. “Relax.”
“Relax! I don’t get it. Why haven’t you called? And why haven’t you gone to work?”
“I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to be at the hospital.”
She was silent. When she spoke again her voice was quiet, controlled: “Should I come over?”
I felt a wave of disgust. “No, thanks.” I heard her sigh and I said, “I’m fine, Jamie, I am. But thanks.”
“Are you going to work tomorrow? Viktor said you’re still on the schedule.”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Well, what have you been doing in the evenings?”
“Sewing.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “I really am.”
I tried calling my mother after that, but I got her machine, so I went outside and sat on my upstairs porch and waited, watching the night fall fast from the trees. I didn’t know who would arrive first, Simon or my mother, and I thought that it didn’t really matter. I thought that aside from being there for Mike nothing much mattered, although I was looking forward to buying some silk first thing in the morning. I guessed that meant I wouldn’t be going to work.
Down on the street my mother’s car pulled up and stopped, and I stood. When she opened the door, the inside light illuminated her narrow figure and the speed with which she was moving, and for a moment I felt hot and tearful, a heavy storm of feeling gathering around me. Then the car door closed, and I moved to the edge of the porch and called hello.
She stopped and looked up. “Honey?”
“Hi.”
“Is everything OK? Are you sick?”
“I’m fine.”
“I—I heard you hadn’t been at work and I was worried.”
I put my hands on the porch rail and felt its rough, splintery surface. A streetlight a couple houses down revealed her shape to me, but I wondered if she could see me at all.
“Are you going to come up?” I said, and finally she made her way up the walk and disappeared onto the downstairs porch.
I went inside. I heard her steps on the enclosed stairway, and I picked up my sketch and pencil and shoved them into a drawer.
She was still in her work clothes, a two-piece beige linen dress over brown suede pumps. She blinked at the bright lights and smiled uneasily. “I’ve called you, a couple of times,” she said. “Is your machine working?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry. I was going to call you tonight.”
“Why no work, hon? Can you tell me?”
“There’s nothing really to tell. I’ve been at the hospital.” I shrugged. “I guess I should’ve called in sick.”
She shifted, and I noticed she was carrying something, a metal box with a handle.
“What’s that?”
She turned it around. On the front there was a red cross.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. I turned and went into the kitchen so she wouldn’t see me struggling not to cry. There was something about being alone with her and on the verge of tears that made me feel desperate. “Do you want something to drink?” I called. She didn’t answer, and I filled two glasses with ice and water and went back to the table. She’d set the first-aid kit down, the blank side up.
“I gather you had words with Rooster,” she said.
“Actually he had most of the words. Who told you?”
“Jamie.”
“It was no big deal.”
“Just a big enough deal to make you hide out for a few days?”
“I don’t like my job. I don’t want to work there anymore.” My heart pounded: the idea had come out of nowhere, but once I’d said it I knew it was true.
“Quit,” she said.
“I might.”
The doorbell rang then, and our heads turned in unison toward the stairway.
“Who’s that?” she said. “Are you expecting someone?” There was a touch of something in her voice that I thought just might be hopefulness.
“It’s Simon Rhodes,” I said. “A friend from high school.”
I started down to let him in, but then I saw him through the glass door, a bunch of pale roses in hand, and I felt the heavy storm again, moving in quickly.
“Hey, don’t,” he said as I opened the door. “Hey, come on. They’re just from my mother’s garden. Hey, hey.”
“My mother’s upstairs,” I sobbed.
He shrugged, pressing the flowers into my hands. “That’s OK,” he said. “That’s fine. Does she feel like having a drink?”
Later he and I sat outside on my porch sipping vodka and tonics, the only illumination a citronella candle that wasn’t doing much to keep the mosquitoes away. I was in a director’s chair, while he’d stretched out on the fraying, webbed nylon seat of an aluminum chaise that Mike had dug out of the Mayers’ basement for me when I first got my apartment. My mother had left shortly after his arrival, taking her first-aid kit with her.
“So you’re going back to New York tomorrow,” I said. “What’s it like there? In five words or less.”
“Huge, filthy, and wonderful. That’s four.”
“Do you see famous people all over the place?”
“Not at all. And usually if I do I don’t recognize them.” He took a noisy sip of his drink. “Once I was out for brunch with a friend of mine, and she spent the whole time making these weird faces at me—opening her eyes really wide and tilting her head. I thought she had something wrong with her contact lenses, but afterward she just about killed me because Liza DeSoto had been sitting at the next table and I hadn’t recognized her.”
“Liza DeSoto of ReCharger?”
“What can I say?” he said. “She looks different with hair.”
I laughed; talking to Simon was such fun. “But is it really romantic and glamorous? Do you go out for dinner at amazing restaurants all the time, you and your boyfriend? I mean, when you’re together?” On the Union terrace he’d told me an on-again/off-again story to rival Christine and Bill’s. His “saga,” he’d called it.
“When we’re together,” he said theatrically, “everything is amazing.” Then he sort of snorted. “Actually, when we’re together having Chinese food around the corner from his apartment and then going to a movie is pretty much our standard. Sorry to disappoint you.”
I shook my head: even Chinese food in New York sounded glamorous. I’d read an article about a Chinese restaurant in New York where almost everything they served you was carved to look like something else—a flower, a bird.
“What about you and Mike?” he said. “What was it like when you were together? I mean happily together.”
I felt a constriction in my throat: happily together, back in the old days. Was Mike waiting for me to revert to the way I’d been in the months leading up to the accident? I couldn’t bear to be an additional source
of misery.
Simon was looking at me.
“What was it like or what did we do?”
“Either. Both.”
I picked up my glass and took a sip. “We hung out. We played tennis, rode bikes, went out drinking. We went to lots of hockey games, saw movies, rented them. Sometimes we took my laundry to his parents’ house.”
“Please tell me you didn’t do his laundry.”
“I didn’t do his laundry,” I said, although in fact I’d thrown something of his in with my stuff as often as not. So what?
He seemed to know I was feeling defensive. He smiled gently and said, “And what was it like?”
What I thought of then was a late afternoon—one of dozens?—when it was just dark enough out so the lights had to be on, and my clean laundry was spilled over his bed, and he was at his desk with a book open but was sitting backward in his chair watching me, and I was pulling socks and underwear away from my sheets, each pull a crackle of static, and we weren’t talking but were entirely attuned, so that when one of us finally did speak, the other was almost sure to say, That’s just what I was thinking.
Simon was waiting for an answer. How could I describe it, the lit room with dusk outside, the companionable silence? “I guess we were regular,” I said at last.
He laughed, but I didn’t feel offended; I had a feeling “regular” was what he wanted, too.
“So what now?” he said after a while. “Are you going to keep hiding out? If I were going to be around longer I’d hide with you.”
I smiled. “Thanks.” I thought of how I’d decided earlier to buy some silk first thing in the morning, and now I thought about it again: going to Fabrications, looking at each roll, narrowing it down to a few and then one. Deciding on a pattern and then the moment when I’d take the fabric to the cutting table and a salesclerk would put scissors to it. Washing my hands once I was home again and carefully removing the fabric from the bag, then draping it across the table so I could admire it fully. It was all too appealing, it would spoil me—for the next thing I’d sew, the next thing I’d do. I looked at Simon, waiting patiently for my answer. “I guess I’ll go back to work,” I said.
CHAPTER 9
In Madison, winter went on forever, October to May some years, so long it often felt endless—less “winter” than Madison itself, life itself. Spring was a blink of an eye, fall a brief, surprising chill. The hottest summers felt short, no matter how hot, how humid. This one, though … July crept by, one scorching day after another. The humidity was unbearable. Leaving the library or the hospital, I thought of the outside air as malevolent. It should have been green, a witch’s breath. Or the gray of toxic exhaust.
Jamie called and called. Did I want to have lunch? Breakfast some morning before work? Dinner? I made excuses until finally she phoned just as I was getting ready to go visit Mike one Friday evening, and when she asked if I’d pick her up on my way to the hospital I had to say yes.
She was waiting on her porch. “I’m so glad I caught you,” she said as she got into the car, and I nodded, then managed to say what needed saying.
“Me, too.”
I pulled away from the curb. Last night Mike had been very quiet, and I wondered how he’d be tonight.
In the seat next to me Jamie sighed, then shifted.
I glanced over at her. “So how’s work these days?”
She answered readily, as if she had material prepared: work was bugging her. The cashiers complained about the machine operators and the machine operators complained about the cashiers. Plus there was this new guy who was kind of cute but also kind of weird—he had a habit of standing really close to people when he talked to them.
“You need to give him an anonymous note about personal space,” I said. “Or find an article about it and leave him a Xerox in his box.”
“Yeah, but then—”
“Then he might not stand so close?”
“Exactly!” she said, and we both chuckled, then fell into silence. I didn’t want her to ask me any questions, but we were almost there; I was probably safe. “Cute how?” I said, and she spent the next few minutes describing the new guy, his blue eyes, his good shoulders, this one shirt he sometimes wore that she didn’t really like.
At last I pulled into the parking lot, and we walked to the entrance without talking. She’d pulled her hair into a French braid that highlighted the pale strand near her face, a running light throught the dark blond twists. As we entered the hospital she gave me a hopeful little smile that broke my heart.
On Mike’s floor, the elevator opened on to a wide corridor lined with stainless steel handrails. Just past a cluster of vending machines, we passed a framed poster of an empty wheelchair. As usual, I didn’t look at it and then did look at it: a black-and-white photograph lit from above so that a complicated web of shadow fell from the wheelchair onto the glossy wood floor. GET MOVING read the caption.
“That dress,” Jamie said. “That’s not the one you bought at Luna last winter, is it?”
My dress had started life as a long-sleeved black number that fell nearly to my ankles: cotton and lycra, not really warm enough for a Midwestern winter, but I’d liked the deeply scooped neckline and the close fit. A few evenings ago I’d attacked it, cut the sleeves off to tight-fitting caps and hemmed the whole thing to a couple inches above my knees. In winter I’d worn a long, skinny cranberry cardigan over it, but now all it needed were some hematite beads. “Sort of,” I said.
“I thought so,” she said. “What’d you do, shorten it?”
“And cut off the sleeves.”
“You’re such a busy bee,” she said, and I looked away.
A few more paces, and we were at Mike’s room. Through the doorway I saw Rooster sitting in the chair Mrs. Mayer usually occupied; it was late enough that she’d gone home. Things between me and Rooster had been a little awkward since the day at the library, almost three weeks ago, and I hesitated, but he turned and gave me a friendly wave, and I stepped into the room. Bill was there, too, perched on the dresser, the black soles of his Tevas tapping against a drawer front. I hadn’t seen him since Christine’s going-away brunch.
“It’s a party,” Mike said from the bed. He was on his side, propped by pillows, the head of the bed elevated a little. The large form of his body lay inert on top of the blanket. I crossed the room and kissed him, angling my face to avoid the halo.
“How are you?” Jamie asked him.
“Totally wiped out.”
I glanced at Rooster. He gave me a half smile, which I took to mean that at least Mike was answering; Rooster’d been present during Mike’s silence last night, too.
Jamie nodded, then went to stand in front of the dresser, near Bill. “Miss James,” Bill said to her.
“Mr. B.”
He grinned. He’d gotten a buzz cut recently, and he had a military look about him—an AWOL look, actually, given the three- or four-day growth of beard on his face.
From the far bed Mike’s roommate was looking at me, and I caught his eye and smiled. He was only fourteen but he looked even younger tonight, his straight blond hair falling past his ears. His name was Jeff Walker, a horrible joke of a name for a boy who’d lost the use of both legs in a car accident. Another one for the collection, though who could bear to add it?
Rooster glanced ostentatiously at his watch. “Whoa,” he said. “Is it after eight?”
I looked at the wall clock: it was twenty after eight, forty minutes until the official end of visiting hours, though no one would object if we stayed longer.
Rooster stretched elaborately and then stood up. He’d changed from his suit, but not into his usual after-work jeans: he wore a crisp, short-sleeved madras shirt and khakis, and his cheeks gleamed from a recent shave. He looked like a Marshall Field’s ad, like a man in a Father’s Day lineup: Just going to spend some quality time with my family today, maybe go out for brunch.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Date,
” he said with a little smile.
“Joan again?” I said facetiously.
He nodded.
“Are you kidding?” I couldn’t believe it, and I glanced around at everyone, trying to figure out what they knew. “OK, I need a little more information.”
He raised his eyebrows and smiled mysteriously, then went to stand by Mike’s bed. He touched Mike’s arm and said, “I’ve got to run, but I’ll see you tomorrow night, OK?”
“Watch yourself,” Mike said. “You’re getting serious.”
Rooster grinned but didn’t respond. “Catch you guys,” he said, and he gave us a little wave as he left the room.
I stared at Mike. Could Rooster really have gotten involved with Joan without my knowing it? Could he have gotten involved with Joan at all? “What’s up with that?” I said. “Is this a thing? Isn’t she about thirty?”
Mike didn’t speak.
“Mike.”
“I don’t know how old she is.” I looked at Bill. “Do you?”
“I’ve never laid eyes on the woman.”
“Well, he might have told you.”
“ ‘Bill?’ ” Bill said with a grin. “ ‘Yes, Rooster?’ ‘The woman I’m seeing tonight is thirty.’ ‘Thanks for telling me, big guy.’ ”
Jamie laughed. “Yeah, C,” she said. “Better lighten up a little.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. I let out a big sigh, then went and sat in Rooster’s chair—Mrs. Mayer’s chair, my chair now. Lying on his side across the room, Mike could no longer really see me, and after a moment I scooted the chair over so I was more in his line of vision. The halo made turning his head impossible, and he’d complained about eyestrain, how you never knew how much you turned your neck until you couldn’t. I wished I hadn’t just been so pushy.
Bill told us about his new job, working for a prof from the biochemistry department. The prof was conducting an experiment on fruit flies, and Bill had to slice wings off the dead ones and look at them under a microscope to check for a certain cell change. Mike listened, but after a while it was clear he needed to sleep. I nodded for Jamie to go out with Bill and wait for me in the hall, and I went and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his shoulder for a while. An orderly would be in soon to get him ready for the night. “I love you,” I said before I left, and he stared at me and then looked away.