by Joan Opyr
“Merlot. It’s not very good.”
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I had to change after my rounds. I should have said eight-thirty instead of eight.” The waitress came over and Susan ordered a glass of white Bordeaux. I looked at the stains on the tablecloth where I’d sloshed my glass and wished I’d ordered white Bordeaux. “Poppy, how have you been? You look great.”
“Thanks. I’ve been fine. Busy. Well, not busy. I had surgery recently.”
“Really? Your mother didn’t mention that.”
“Must’ve slipped her mind. What with . . . you know.”
She reached across the table and held out her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I reached back, upsetting my wine glass. “Leave it,” she said. “Let the tablecloth soak it up. It’s only a drop. Poppy, I’m sorry about your grandfather. I’m sorry he’s dying, and that you’ve had to come back home to deal with this. I want you to know that we can talk about him tonight. We can talk about my mother, too. We can talk about anyone and anything, about what they did to everyone with their affair. What they did to us, you and me.”
I held her hand for a moment, savoring the sensation. Then I let it go.
“What’s the matter?”
“I want to know why we can talk about it now,” I said. “We couldn’t talk about it then. I wanted to talk to you. I tried.” She was watching me with concern. I looked away. “I don’t think I can do this. I can’t sit here and eat dinner with you and pretend like this is the happy reunion of old friends. I feel seventeen years old. I don’t feel like I’m another minute older than I was back then.”
“Funny,” she said. “I feel ancient.”
“I’ll get it!” I yelled, nearly yanking the phone out of the kitchen wall. “Hello?”
“Poppy?” Susan spoke in the same quiet, confident voice she always had. I felt a vague sense of resentment. I was a nervous wreck, and she sounded like she was placing an order at the McDonald’s drive-through. “Why did you leave this morning?”
I felt my mother watching me. “I had to let the dog out. He was tearing up your laundry room. Hunter set fire to the drapes last night.”
“We need to talk,” she said, ignoring the non sequitur. “Can you come over?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to see you.”
I wanted to see her, too, more than anything. I wanted to tell her about Lucky Eddie, that he was coming to my graduation, and that he might give me a car. I wanted to ask her how I could get out of going to N. C. State and sharing an apartment with my mother. I wanted to know if she loved me as much I loved her. I wanted to know if she was a lesbian for life or just for last night.
Instead, I closed my eyes and repeated, “I don’t know.”
There was a long pause, and then, “Is this going to ruin everything?”
“No, it’s just . . .”
“Yes or no, will you see me?”
I couldn’t tell if my mother was listening or not. She seemed to be absorbed in her newspaper, circling apartment prospects with a blue magic marker. “Yes.”
“Good. How about tonight? My parents won’t be home until tomorrow. I called them at the beach house and told them they should stay another day because I was held up at school. Six o’clock. I’ll cook dinner, what do you say?”
I said yes. It was what I wanted to say. I wished I could tell my family to stay away and actually have them do it. Instead, my mother was planning to become my college roommate, and my father was coming to wreck my graduation.
I hung up the phone. “I’m having supper with Susan tonight. In the meantime, I’m going to bed.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You have to be at the flea market in half an hour. Cookie’s expecting you to open the concession stand. Go change your clothes and I’ll drop you off on my way to K-Mart.”
“Why are you going to K-Mart?”
She pointed at the charred fabric soaking in a dishpan on the kitchen counter.
“To buy some new drapes. And a fire extinguisher.”
The light in The Irregardless was dim and intimate. A lone cellist played somewhere out of sight around the corner from our table. I didn’t recognize the piece.
“What kind of surgery did you have?” Susan asked.
“A hysterectomy.”
“Complete?”
“Simple, or rather, halfway complete. They took my uterus and one ovary. One is all you need, they tell me. At least I won’t have to take estrogen to keep from growing a mustache.”
“When was this?”
“Let’s see.” I looked at my watch. “Eleven days ago.”
“Good heavens,” she said. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be up and around yet. You ought to be at home, taking it easy. How do you feel?”
“Tired and sore,” I admitted. “But I was tired and sore at home. It’s not any worse here, and here is where I need to be.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but I spoke first.
“Tell me about Yugoslavia.”
She took a sip of her wine. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything. What was it like? Why did you go?”
“I went because my father’s family was from Belgrade,” she said. “His father, my grandfather, came to the U. S. in 1919 or 1920, just after the First World War. I never met him. He died before I was born. He was some sort of radical—a bomb-throwing anarchist, my dad says. He spent most of the war in an Austrian prison.”
“Your grandfather was Gavrilo Princip?”
She laughed. “Not exactly. He didn’t shoot Archduke Francis Ferdinand.” She tapped her fingers on the side of her wine glass. “Imagine remembering something like that. We have strange pockets of knowledge, don’t we?”
“It’s the by-product of a liberal education. I can’t remember where I put my car keys, but I remember all sorts of pointless things, like who started World War I, or who wrote London Labour and the London Poor. I don’t know what use it is, unless you’re playing Trivial Pursuit.”
“It’s useful for other reasons,” she said. “The people I work with at the hospital only want to talk about their investments and their Hummers. Physicians can be very dull. All of our light conversation is either boring or macabre.”
“That’s what Abby says. They’re apparently really sick in the Trauma ICU—I mean they make sick jokes. The nurses in her unit are pretty jaded.”
“They would be,” she agreed. “That’s one of the reasons I like working ER. It’s very real. The general population has no idea. They suspect that certain people exist, gang members, murderers, drug addicts, self-mutilators, psychotics. They read about them or see them on the nightly news, but they don’t interact with them in the course of everyday life.”
“And you do.”
“And I do.”
Susan had ordered a vegetarian entrée, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d followed suit. It was good, a Portobello mushroom cap stuffed with tomatoes, garlic, and provolone, and at the same time unsatisfying. What I really wanted was a steak.
“So, you went to Yugoslavia because of Gavrilo Princip.”
“I went to Yugoslavia to be of some use to someone. I had a distant connection to the people and skills I felt were being wasted here. I realized that I’ve been very selfish all of my life, Poppy. My father paid for college and medical school. I never had to work a part-time job or worry about a thing. I finished my general residency and then spent two years training to be a surgeon. I did it because I wanted to make a lot of money. I thought I’d do plastic work, tummy tucks and eye lifts. I’d cater to the vain.”
“I thought you wanted to be a general practitioner, doing the Mother Teresa thing among the poor and needy.”
“That was my high school plan,” she said. “When Jean died . . . I got calloused.”
I chewed the last of my Portobello. Susan ordered dessert, a crème brûlée.
“What changed, Susan?” It was a loaded question. She took it to
refer to her change in career plans, which it did, in part.
“I don’t know. It might have been a gradual realization that I was on the wrong track, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt sudden. I woke up one morning and decided to do something different. I resigned my surgical residency and contacted Médecins sans Frontières. I knew they worked in the scattered parts of the former Yugoslavia, and I said I wanted to volunteer. I treated people in refugee camps—flu, diarrhea, gunshot wounds, bomb victims, you name it. When I came back home, I wanted to keep some of that connection to the real. I also wanted to go home at night and leave the war behind me.”
“Do you leave the war behind?”
“Some days, yes. Others, no.”
We finished our meal. I had a bite of her dessert. I liked the crème brûlée—it was crunchy and creamy and just the right amount of sweet. She offered to drive me back to my hotel, and I said yes. She asked if she could come in for coffee. I said that Abby was probably in the room asleep and suggested that we have coffee in the hotel restaurant. The look she gave me was inscrutable.
“I know you’re busy,” she said, “but would you like to come to dinner tomorrow night? I think we have more to talk about. My house this time. I’ll cook.”
“It depends on how my grandfather’s doing,” I said. “I think it’ll be okay.”
“I’ll pick you up. You shouldn’t drive.”
“I know. Abby’s seized control of the rental car. So far this week, she’s been Driving Miss Daisy.”
“Abby,” she said musingly. “You two were always inseparable. I’m glad that hasn’t changed.”
“‘Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’ Hamlet.”
“If I were Abby, I’d be extremely flattered.”
I laughed. “Abby would say that it was the least I could do. I have half of a Ph. D. in English. If I couldn’t summon up the occasional quotation from Shakespeare, I’d have wasted several years and several thousands of dollars.”
“Still,” she said.
“Still,” I agreed. I opened the car door. The overhead light illuminated Susan’s face for a moment. She suddenly looked older. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes and fine lines above the bridge of her nose. It occurred to me that however young I felt, I certainly didn’t look it. It might have been thanks to her highlights, but I had more visible gray in my hair than Susan.
“Six o’clock tomorrow night?” she said.
“Six o’clock. Don’t bother to come up. I’ll meet you down here.” I eased myself out of the car’s bucket seat. Susan drove a Honda Civic, small and low to the ground. Not the most comfortable ride for the recent hysterectomy patient.
“Poppy . . .”
“Yes?”
“I wish I knew something Shakespearean to say to you.”
“You have until tomorrow night to brush up,” I replied lightly. “Goodnight.”
I was unsteady on my feet as I walked down the thickly carpeted hallway of the Velvet Cloak. To be funny, Nick Stybak had always called it the Velvet Cloaca. I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the electronic card that unlocked the door. It was missing, so I knocked. Abby opened the door. “And?” she asked, her voice portentous.
“‘What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’” I said. “Othello.”
“I told you to wash it out with peroxide,” she replied.
Chapter Fourteen
“I thought I’d go to Durham tomorrow,” Abby said. “Do you need me to drive you anywhere?”
“Just drop me off at Nana’s in the morning. They want to go to the hospital and then the flea market. If Hunter’s dead when we get to the hospital, I might be spared the flea market.”
“Everyone does appear to be taking this in stride,” Abby observed.
“That’s how we take everything,” I replied. “Life, death, marriage, divorce—never mind us, we’re just window shopping.”
I was on the verge of being drunk. I was simultaneously loquacious and resentful at having to talk. I had that tipsy feeling behind my eyes, as if the room were going to start spinning at any moment. I could have used a walk in the night air.
“How was your dinner with Susan?”
“It was . . . inconclusive.”
“You mean she didn’t throw you down on the table and say, ‘God, I have dreamed of this moment’?”
“No. And I didn’t do that to her, though that strikes me as the more likely scenario. We sat, we ordered, we ate our meal. I talked about you and about living in Portland. She talked about Yugoslavia. She worked with Doctors without Borders, Médecins sans Frontières. Ever heard of them?” She nodded. “Well, you’re better than I am. We talked a little about the past, not a lot. We only broached the subject of Jean and my grandfather long enough to agree that it was now an okay subject to talk about.”
“Why did you talk about me?” Abby asked.
“I said you were here with me. She asked how you were.”
“God, she probably thought we were a couple.”
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah, so what? We are a couple. We’ve lived together off and on for sixteen years. You’re as serious as I get about anyone. Just ask Dolores. And Carol. And Leesa, Lisa, and Tracy.”
“Stop,” she said. “You’re running out of fingers. And names.”
“Do you mind if I watch TV?”
She shook her head and tossed me the remote control. I sat up and flipped through the channels. I rejected reruns of Seinfeld and Friends in favor of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
After a few minutes, I said, “I wish someone would stick a stake through my heart. No, wait. Someone already has.” I fell back and feigned writhing in agony until I felt the room shift beneath me. I held very still until the walls stopped moving.
“Just how much did you have to drink tonight?” Abby said. “You’re not usually this maudlin.”
“No, but I do suffer the occasional bout of feeling sorry for myself.”
I tried wallowing in despair for a moment or two, but even drunk, despair was a stretch. What I was suffering from was acute nostalgia, the recognition that time had passed and things had changed, and still yesterday was always more clear to me than today. It was certainly more comfortable; I knew what was going to happen.
“I had two glasses of horse-piss merlot, and then we split a bottle of something which might have been better. I don’t know. My taste buds were already shot by then.”
“Are you going to see her again?”
“Yep. Barring the immediate demise of my grandfather, she’s asked me to come to her house tomorrow night. Her dad’s going to be up in Virginia, delivering a new Lexus to a customer—now isn’t that a ridiculous sentence? ‘Come on over. My dad’s out of town.’ At our age. Do you want to know my theory?”
“Do I have a choice?” Abby seized the remote control. “Let’s watch something without stakes. I had steak for dinner.” She switched channels to VH1.
“Ha-ha. This is my theory—I just thought of it, lying here on this fabulous hotel bed. My theory is that time isn’t linear. It isn’t even circular. It’s a big, amorphous, overlapping blob. Different times exist simultaneously, and you’re a different age depending on who you’re with. For example, with my grandmother, I’m fifteen. I’ve just learned to drive a car, and I’m still working out the kinks. I’m kind of headstrong and annoying but appealing in a gawky and awkward sort of way. She doesn’t know what to do with me. With my mother—that’s trickier—with my mother, it’s not about my age, it’s about hers. We’re both still teenagers. We’re the same age, though she might be a little older. She’s my slightly older sister. We get along well. We’ll be friends when we grow up.”
Abby propped herself up on her elbow and looked at me. “That’s an interesting theory. You stole some of it from Einstein and the rest from Buddha.”
“Wrong. I stole it all from a guy named Crazy Charlie. We used to
ride together on public transit.”
“When was that?”
“1982, I think. I didn’t say it was a new theory, I said I just thought of it.”
“Tell me,” she said seriously. “How old are we? I mean you and me, together?”
I thought about it for a moment. How old were we? I didn’t feel young with Abby, and I didn’t feel old. I felt thirty-four and not thirty-four. Time didn’t stand still; it moved and we moved with it, not sweeping us along or smothering us, just going along day by day. Abby seemed the same to me, and yet I knew she was profoundly different. She wasn’t older, she wasn’t younger; she just was. Even when she had her breakdown after Rosalyn died, she didn’t regress. She just disappeared.
“We’re the same age,” I said finally. “And that’s whatever age we are.”
She said nothing. Her eyes had a faraway look, as if she weren’t at the Velvet Cloak or anywhere else in Raleigh, North Carolina. She might have been time traveling.
“Day after tomorrow,” she said, coming back to earth, “I’m having lunch with Kim DiMarco at the Rathskellar. You want to come? We can find out how old she is.”
“I know how old Kim is. She’s the same age she was in high school. She’s a thirty-five year-old divorcée. She has two kids, two ex-husbands, and two boyfriends, one named Sven and the other named Bob. The future stretches out before her like the smorgasbord at the Ikea. She might get married, she might win a Nobel prize, or she might take a ceramics class. Who knows?”
“I gather you have other plans.”
“On the contrary. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Perhaps it was the wine. I fell asleep with my clothes on and dreamt about my grandfather’s second wife, Tammy Carter. Until I was thirteen, I didn’t know she existed. No one ever mentioned her. No one ever mentioned my grandparents’ first divorce. I knew they’d been married twice, but I’d assumed that the second ceremony was a renewal of vows. There was a picture in our living room of Hunter in a dark blue suit and Nana in a cream-colored sheath with a short damask jacket. They stood together in my Aunt Dot’s formal dining room, hands clasped on the handle of a silver server, slicing into a white sheet cake. It was June 5, 1971, which, had there been no interruption, would have been their thirtieth anniversary.