Honeydew: Stories

by Edith Pearlman

  She wanted to know—she had resorted to a pad of paper now, managing the pencil with her less damaged hand—how much of her tongue they would leave. Her surgeon wouldn’t say.

  “She can’t say, Mrs. Flaherty. Neither can I. But I can tell you that there are many ways therapists can restore some patients’ speech.” She had to be content with that, and also with his now averted gaze, though he did press her hand.

  “U eye oy” were her parting syllables.

  He didn’t feel like a nice boy. In two days, when he made his post-op visit, she wouldn’t be able to manage even those vowels, and if therapy could help this half-tongued woman it would be a miracle. But he hadn’t lied.

  He looked at the next patient’s chart. An unsingular history. White female; thirty-six years old; unmarried; healthy; one pregnancy, terminated. No immediate family. Complaint: back pain lasting several months, recent inability to walk without severe pain. X-rays and an MRI of the vertebrae showed a mass obscuring L4 and L5 but revealed nothing more about this secret. A needle biopsy had told more. Stage 4.

  Her name was Catherine Adrian. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes. Shallow vertical grooves, one on each cheek, enclosed her sculpted mouth in loving parentheses. Her jaw was long and slender. He could make these observations freely because she was asleep and he could comfortably look at her face.

  He glanced at his clipboard. He had three more patients to visit, to reassure about tomorrow, to convince that they were in good hands, or at least that their pain from the knife would be managed to their satisfaction. He’d come back to Ms. Adrian later.

  As if on cue, she opened her eyes. They were blue, almost as dark as the ones he avoided in his mirror.

  “Hello, Ms. Adrian. I’m Zephyr Finn, your anesthesiologist.”

  “How nice.”

  In Ms. Adrian’s room there was both a chair and a stool. Zeph chose to sit on the side of her bed. “Are you worried about tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Say that I’m curious.”

  “About…?”

  “I want to see what it looks like, this alien that’s wrapped itself around my spine. I’d like to watch on a screen while they disappear it.”

  “Some back operations are done with regional anesthetic,” he said as if reading from a script. “Patients on the table can watch a monitor. Most close their eyes. But we don’t know the depth of your growth and we can’t risk touching an organ while you’re awake.”

  “Can you preserve the thing in alcohol?”

  “I can ask the surgeon.”

  She sighed. “Whatever they find, there will be an end to my pain.”

  She would soon be paralyzed, he guessed. “Yes,” he said with assurance.

  And then—as if she were under his care already, as if he had administered a nerve block and a sedative and was keeping her lightly awake—he talked. The volumes by the side of the bed were children’s books—The House at Pooh Corner, the novels of Peter Dickinson, the Grimms. “I read those too,” he said. “My only genre. That small amount of magic.”

  “Chaste pleasures.”

  “Endings never final…”

  She taught mathematics at a local junior college, not a very good one. “I do mainly remediation, I try to make things interesting; some of them fall asleep anyway. I’m a soporific—perhaps I’m really in your game.”

  Game took them to chess and Scrabble and the Red Sox—he avoided mentioning participatory sports; she probably had played tennis, poor thing. An hour went by. More time would have passed had the surgeon not entered the room to find his best anesthesiologist sitting on a patient’s bed.

  Robotic again, Zeph got to his feet. “Good afternoon, Dr. Schapiro.”

  Dr. Schapiro nodded and took Ms. Adrian’s hand in his. “How are you feeling today?” he began.

  Zeph walked toward the door, turned, flashed his eyes at hers. She flashed back.

  The mass, as she was about to learn, had wangled its way inward from its claw hold on L4. A frozen section done in the OR confirmed that the tumor was a ferocious beast; it had already eaten bone; bits of it must be all over the place.

  Hector Bahande and Victoria Tarnapol gradually exchanged life stories. Hector spoke of his hopes when he’d come to this country and of the things that had bedeviled him one after another—his child’s affliction, his wife’s death, rest her soul, the necessity of finding a job near home. Victoria told him that she had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat. Maybe if you cooked better…

  “She won’t last forever,” Victoria’s sisters had falsely assured her. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask God to rest her soul. “How does your older daughter occupy her time?” she said to Hector.

  His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. “She carves,” he said, his homely face continuing to beam. “She carves animals and small human figures.”

  Oh Lord, sweet little lambs, darling odalisques. She was sorry she’d asked.

  “Shall I show you?” His hand was already in his pocket. “Most are bigger; this is a mini.”

  It was the figure of a dog—a puppy, really—peeking in solemn distress, with no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the buttons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.

  “Are there more of these?” she asked sharply.

  “Many, many, but bigger.”

  “Does she sell them?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money.”

  A pimp, she thought…“Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage.”

  He carefully wiped his mouth. “Miss Tarnapol—”

  “Victoria.”

  “Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with shells.”

  “Yes, of course…but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought-after window dresser for a time. Hector…may I come and see the others?”

  “I will bring you two tomorrow.”

  He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll’s carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief, pressing themselves to her stomach, suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.

  “Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he actually gets for these. Let me try to sell them, and I will retain the ten percent and give the rest to you. I’ll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift-shop window as advertisement. ‘Not for Sale,’ the card will read…intriguing.”

  “Nobody will be intrigued by a woman about to die in childbirth.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of Godolphin, just over the Boston line. Then she persuaded the owner of a flourishing dress shop in fashionable downtown to display the next piece Hector brought her, a mynah bird with a stocking cap, each stitch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own commission with the dress-shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla’s pieces always occupied a place of honor there. Some people began to come in not for the clothing, primarily, but to see what was on display, though everyone usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.

  As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe’s house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless ac
tivity: reading Zeph’s anatomy book in Zeph’s monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.

  Anatomy wasn’t altogether strange to them. In sex education, they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up toward his partner, the ovum; and they knew there were times he would fail to reach her—because of her monthly, maybe, or fate, maybe. “But fate may be against you,” the teacher warned. In the anatomy book they had seen artists’ renditions of various tumors, some like sacks of vermicelli, some like furry fungi. And when a popular football player injured his knee, the television anchor informed them—separately, for each was at home, though they conferred about it later—that the knee was one of the most complicated joints in the body. Certainly it seemed loaded with ligaments, menisci, tendons, and cartilage. The whole apparatus looked untrustworthy, Acelle told Joe.

  “Interdependent,” he corrected.

  Her father’s knee gave him a shitload of trouble. She’d wanted to borrow the book for a night and bring it home to Camilla, who could have looked at the various two-dimensional drawings and carved a knee in her own peculiar style. But Joe would never permit the book to leave the room. So one day Acelle herself tried to draw versions of the joint. Joe was muttering the names of the facial nerves, probably memorizing them. Zeph’s book was open on the bed, and they were kneeling before it. Joe kept repeating his sequence, and she kept drawing. Then he turned toward her. “Lacrimal, lingual, mandibular. Aren’t you through yet? Ophthalmic.”

  “Yes,” she said. She would come back to the knee.

  They turned a few pages, and found the circulatory system.

  And there it was, just what she’d been waiting for: a lumpy device with chambers and ventricles and arteries and atriums—atria—looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else’s ventricle, from one heart to another, that’s how it was, it happened in every story she’d read. It happened in palaces and cities and farms and in the neighborhoods. You could be a princess lying in a Castle bed, you could be stuck in a wheelchair, you could be a security guard, you could be a woman with hair like a boy’s. The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy, like Zeph, like Joe…

  “It’s getting dark,” Joe said.

  “I’d better go home.”

  “Tiptoe,” he warned.

  Catherine would receive her useless chemical infusions as an inpatient—fetching her with an ambulance every day, meanwhile trying to slow the failure of the other organs, was too impractical even for the nitpicking insurance company.

  “So I’ll die here,” she said, “of one thing or another.”

  It was their five o’clock visit—the only one of the day. This was her most alert half hour. By the end of the first week they knew everything about each other—her long deteriorating love affair; his compliant mother, who followed Old Walking Stick from commune to commune, Zeph in tow, until she died of exhaustion; his difficulty talking to anyone who wasn’t on the table; her disappointment with the trajectory of her life. He described special places in the Castle. There was a memorial tomb containing a Civil War soldier in the basement, so big you could sleep on it yourself—he sometimes had done so. The residents’ crash room, where anyone with a free quarter of an hour could lie undisturbed on the bed. (“I kept Treasure Island under the pillow,” he confided.) The hospital chapel, so plain and undenominational that, when empty of sobbing people, it seemed like the waiting area of a railroad station at two in the morning.

  He always brought pastry from Victoria, who saved it for him. Catherine managed a bite; after a while Zeph ate the rest. One afternoon, after leaving Catherine, he went into the gift shop and bought the suffering doll. “Preeclampsia,” he diagnosed. Victoria quietly took down the Not for Sale sign and wrapped the thing. Zeph put it on a shelf in his room.

  The time came when Catherine’s organs insisted on failing—kidneys, liver. “Without the chemo I might feel less sick,” she said.

  “You might.”

  “I think I’ll order it stopped.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “What would you do if you were me?”

  “If I were you? If I were you I’d marry me.”

  IV poles were their best men. Zeph had invited Joe and Joe had invited Acelle. The justice of the peace ignored the ages of these witnesses—they could write their names, couldn’t they. Through the three narrow archers’ windows a pale sun illuminated Catherine’s pale face. The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had bought rings for both of them. His “I do” was firm, surprising everyone but Catherine. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.

  He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword from its sheath and swished at the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.

  From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.

  She died a week later of renal failure—more or less peacefully, as such things go.

  Camilla didn’t become the rage, but she acquired a small reputation in the city, and she banished the crook who called himself a dealer. Victoria persuaded her to entrust her work to a small respectable agency with a good publicist. Camilla agreed, on the condition that her own photograph never appear and her disability not be mentioned. Pride, Victoria expected, could be overcome as time went on. Money came in. The Bahande flat was gradually improved until it looked like a home.

  “But what about your ten percent?” Hector argued one day after dinner.

  He and Victoria were now sitting on the porch, Hector’s painful knee elevated on a wicker stool. Victoria had cooked the meal for everyone in the Bahande kitchen—fish, a salad, fruit, walnut bread. Joe had spent the rest of the evening reading Richard Dawkins; Acelle, working on her knitting: a scarf for someone. Zeph watched Camilla carve a cat’s head for his walking stick; one feline eye had a congenital droop. Only Camilla knew that Zeph was planning to give the stick to her father. When Joe said he was going home, Zeph had interrupted his silent concentration to keep the boy company on the walk. The girls had gone to bed.

  “Your ten percent,” Hector said again.

  “I’m aging, not an agent. I’m glad someone else is doing that hard work. I’m suited to a gift shop.”

  “You have been a gift to us,” he said softly.

  How handsome he looked in his new shirt—though no more handsome than in the security officer’s uniform he put on every day.

  “As for old—you are not much older than me,” he said, leaning forward but not yet touching her.

  “I’m sixty.”

  He nodded without surprise. “I’m forty-five, and my bad joints make me fifty. Come live with us.”

  She considered this suggestion. Her sisters would never speak to her again—that would be a blessing. She was an experienced caretaker. The family’s nutrition would improve. She could keep an eye on the romances developing in the neighborhood.

  “Together we can walk to the Castle,” she said. And he took that as the acceptance it was.

  Stone

  She had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn’t much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.

  The flat town was surrounded by low mountains and contained a small college and a river and a single movie house. The family was a decorous threesome. And she, Ingrid? A woman of a certain age, twice widowed, made rich by the second spouse. Member of several boards; at home, always a telephone call away from any one of her interesting friends if she wanted a brief spurt of company; possessed of a little den lined with books when she wanted to be alone. Admired for the arresting angulari
ty of her face; and for her height (she was very tall and her extra-long neck added a few inches); and for the melancholy curve of her smile; and for her golden eyes, halved by bifocals, turning their gaze nowadays toward distant hills, though their usual view was the row of brownstones across the street from her Upper West Side apartment. She lived on Sixty-Third Street.

  She had lived on Sixty-Third Street. Now, in this town of no account, she was employed by her first dead husband’s dead sister’s son. During the past decades he’d grown from a rangy quiet boy into a tall taciturn man with thighs as strong as the trunks of pecan trees. Now she engaged in not-quite-confidential conversations with his underweight wife, Lynne. Lynne was exactly the age—thirty-six—of Ingrid’s own daughter, a photographer out in Seattle with a wife who was also a photographer. Strung with equipment, the two women came to New York every so often. Eager, bold greyhounds—next to them Lynne could be taken for a rabbit. Now Ingrid played Sorry! with her nephew’s five-year-old daughter, Chloe, exactly the age that her own son had been when disease snatched him from her…well, wouldn’t that be synchronous. In fact, her little boy had been only four.

  Ingrid missed her favorite lunch place on Broadway. She missed those interesting friends; they would do anything for each other, see each other through sicknesses and crises and losses, supply a word that had fallen through a crevice in the brain and try to patch the other cracks of their shared aging. They wanted her to come home; so said their letters (she had taken a vacation from e-mail). Also she missed her dressmaker, a genius whose designs did not attempt to conceal Ingrid’s long, long neck with collars or scarves but instead advertised it with long, long necklines, making it seem something that you might want for yourself.

  Here she was, and not a dressmaker for miles.

  The house was at the end of a dirt road. Its gray stones glinted, and a fecund trumpet vine ran all over the walls. There was a gable roof of slate and a chimney and a pale garden tended by Lynne. The dense woods pressed on the backyard; it seemed as if the two apple trees in front had pushed themselves forward without permission. The house had an old black stove in its kitchen—an inconvenient appliance you had to light with a sparker. Someday, Chris swore, he would provide his family with a house of his own making—wooden, of course, for wood was his business; porched, the better to admire the flowers outside; a second floor as wide as the first; and, in back, a shed for his tools, now rammed behind the furnace. And a real downstairs bathroom, not just a toilet on the other side of the little room off the kitchen, a room called Useless. Useless had a single high window and a sink in one corner. You could wash one handkerchief in that useless sink. Someday, yes, a new house. Meanwhile, Ingrid thought, the small deep-set windows with their lashes of vines gave the old house a knowing air, as if it heard your thoughts.