Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Wendy? She was here. She hasn’t changed at all.”

  “She is extremely ill. She believes it was all her fault. She believes you blame her for what happened, though we both know that would be ridiculous.”

  Entrapment! (What happened? What happened?)

  “Of course,” I say lightly, haughtily.

  “It is probable that you are the only person who can help her.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  I am lying about the night terror.

  Every evening I silently implore the night nurse to douse me with sufficient sedative so that sleep will rush me on an express ride right through to morning, no stops. Yet I am too proud to ask her, to admit that I am afraid of the dark. And every night there is a derailment somewhere before sunrise.

  The ward is black and still as death, and I try desperately not to look out of the window. I push my egg head back against the pillow, forbidding it to turn. But it turns against my will and sees the street where the street lamp bums like a coal against the sky, a devil’s eye. My attention is riveted helplessly to it, I cannot turn away. Sheer terror rams through me at high voltage and my body begins to convulse, even the bed goes into spasms. It is impossible to breathe.

  The night nurse comes running with medication.

  In the morning Dr Simon begs me once again to confide in him, but the street light is watching. Menacing. Mocking: See my innocuous daytime disguise? Who will believe you?

  I am afraid of being thought crazy.

  “I don’t have night terrors,” I tell Dr Simon. “Only that dream I already told you about.”

  The days have grown fins and swim around me in circles. I remember the white dress with blue ribbons that I wore for my eighth birthday party. I remember (is it possible, or do I only remember the retelling?), I remember the day – I was only three years old – when I said yes I would ride in the side-car of my father’s old motorcycle, and when he made it roar I was terrified and wouldn’t get in. I remember the day my mother grew pale and slumped into tears, wasting away like a snow woman in spring. That was today, I think. And my father blighted with anguish, pretending that all was well. Was that today?

  At night the planets collide and give off sparks. Red eyes stare in at windows and bounce off bed covers.

  Sometimes the days seem to be braiding themselves over me like smoke plumes, twisting, dizzying.

  I have floated willy-nilly on time to this amazing point: I have been discharged. My mother, consumed with tenderness, instead of the night nurse, hovers by me. My father, over breakfast, sighs for what cannot be believed. It is a good thing that I have this heavy responsibility of my parents. Behind the mask, I program myself for action.

  I have to see Dr Simon, whom I tell nothing, twice a week. I am still waiting to see how I will hatch. For months yet I will have to wear my plaster shell, I will actually have to begin university inside it, a newfangled version of the pale lady cursed with isolation:

  But who hath seen her wave her hand?

  Or at the casement seen her stand?

  Or is she known in all the land.

  The Lady of Shalott?

  Ah well, I have always turned heads.

  I will be very fair, they tell me, allergic to sunlight, my skin frail as ancient manuscripts that crumble into ash if touched. Dues to pay: for loving too warmly the hungry touch of young men’s hands and of ocean and sun on my golden (though still chaste) flesh, I must get it to a nunnery. I will cloister it with high-necked dresses and long sleeves and wide-brimmed hats. This can be done elegantly. I shall think of myself as Ophelia, pale with doom. I have decided to be mysterious and desirable and infinitely remote. (I am half sick of shadaws, said the Lady of Shalott …) I have decided to exist as my own literary commentary. I have decided that I will still be beautiful, though tragic.

  To believe otherwise …

  I do not know how to believe otherwise – unthinkable as adjusting to a surgical change of gender.

  * * *

  We always meant to enrol together, Christina, Wendy, and I. Medicine, law, and literature. Strange how things turn out. Strange to sign up alone.

  Alone. A word that sneaks up on me, causing breathing problems. Words and objects are becoming unreliable, turning unpredictably vicious. Street lamps, for instance.

  But I still turn heads. I am not ordinary. No. Never.

  Freshmen, freshwomen, and one fresh egg, I joke.

  Fortunately they visualise me, me as I was, inside the egg. That me and this me: beauty and the beast. They are in awe of me.

  She hath no loyal knight and true, the Lady of Shalott, though formerly the boys would follow, tongues lolling, as if I were in heat; the same boys who now stand shocked, coughing with embarrassment, who reach out nervously to shake my hand.

  The night terrors have changed since I came home.

  I dream that at the witching hour someone comes into my room with surgical scissors. “It’s time,” a voice says, and I see that I am in an amphitheatre. From the gallery hundreds of people watch, their faces pressed up against my comic little life, as my mask is cut away. My convulsions begin, my breathing goes into arrest.

  “Please!” I gasp. “Please, leave it on. I’m used to it. I don’t mind it. I like it!”

  The cutting goes on inexorably until I am hatched.

  A roar of laughter jangles from the gallery like doomsday bells, re-echoing and multiplying infinitely, a mirrored corridor of endless sound.

  My mother has sobbed to Dr Simon that I accuse her of laughing at me. I cannot forgive my dreams for spilling over in this improper way, for slopping their mess into other lives.

  I tell Dr Simon nothing.

  Of course it was sheer defiance to use the subway when I could have taken taxis, but that is what I decided to do. I bought my tokens with aggressive nonchalance. I nodded to people with my egg head, I smiled through my mouth hole. Every morning I challenged my life, my bitter enemy: Try to defeat me!

  I have made up my mind to be beautiful no matter what I look like. On this point I will not yield.

  On the train I read for my philosophy course, an absorbing subject. I have been pondering such questions as fate, and how we shape it after our prevailing whim – as benign, as vicious, as random. I have been pondering democracy and how the subway, the great equaliser, is possibly its leading institution.

  This happened one day: a group of schoolboys, half a dozen twelve-year-olds, began snickering at me. That is all. Snickering behind their hands.

  If only it had been malicious, a calculated insult. If only I could have sent out in advance wallet photographs of my other self, along with pocket handkerchiefs … If I could have stood like thunder, my frog disguise splitting in two, and said: behold, the princess!

  There was no mistaking their guilt, their attempts to stifle the embarrassed spurts of merriment.

  At that moment – even as I observed with supernatural clarity the subway map over their heads, the advertisement for H&R Block and for what to do about aching feet, the mole on one boy’s ear lobe, the undone muddy shoe-laces of another – at that moment I remembered what had happened. The unbearable banality of it, that I had been hiding with such terror from myself.

  The lake, the picnic table, the coals on the barbecue, the steaks that were still not sizzling.

  “I think we should swim while we’re waiting,” Christina had said. “Why is it taking so long, I wonder?”

  ‘Wendy didn’t put enough starter fluid on the coals.”

  Her plaintive voice: “I’m sorry. I was sure I had plenty.”

  “Well, obviously you didn’t. Squirt some more on.”

  “She can’t do that. Cilla. It’s dangerous once the coals are smouldering. Anyway, I want to swim.”

  “The boys will be here and the food won’t be ready and we’ll
just have to admit …”

  Wendy pleading: “I’ll do it, Cilla. If I stand back, it should be okay, shouldn’t it?”

  “Nonsense!” Christina the Good inevitably restraining and comforting. “Who cares what the boys say? Let’s swim first.”

  Such a child, Wendy. We were moon and sun to her. She did not shift her gaze from me, still pleading mutely.

  Coward! my eyes scorned.

  I seem to see it again in slow motion: the jerk of Wendy’s arm, the can of starter fluid, and a long crystal arc hissing in below the steaks.

  And then there was a great ball of fire, like the plaything of some wanton child-giant, which bounced lightly into the air and swallowed us up.

  I remember bellowing like a gored bull at the snickering subway boys. Wmdows shattered under my outrage. Wheels and tracks beckoned with their hideous promises. All this extravagance I remember with horrid clarity. It was martyrdom I was frantic for. Tragedy. Significance.

  “A monster should look monstrous, of course,” I told Dr Simon. “I’m sure I had it coming.”

  “This is quite an orgy.” (How I hate that insufferable therapeutic gentleness!) “The devil incarnate herself.”

  “That’s right. Were you hoping for soap opera? Tears, remorse, throwing myself at Wendy’s feet?”

  “No. I’m not sure even you could do anything for Wendy now.”

  I bridled at that. “If I smiled at her and asked her nicely, she would walk into the burning. If I took her hand she could walk right out of her twilight.”

  “She knows she is alone.”

  “So?” I said, fighting to breathe. “So? We’re both alone. Who can be more alone than a freak locked inside a mask? Nobody even knows what I look like. And that’s fine by me. I’ll manage.”

  “And when the mask is removed?”

  “I don’t think a monster like me should be let loose on the world, do you? Scattering my kisses of death? I think I’ll stay veiled. It’s safer for all concerned.”

  “The mask is coming off next week. Cilla. There’ll be nowhere to hide.”

  * * *

  In the dream the world is on fire, glowing phantasmagoria flickering by me like the tattered frames of an old black-and-white movie. The Italian widow and the boys on the subway are laughing without a sound. Christina is standing transfigured, transparent with flame. Was she beautiful? We always thought so. We took it for granted. (Not in the same way that I am. Was. But just in that way … people looked at her with pleasure. At me with awe or envy, perhaps. But at Christina with simple pleasure.) There’s Wendy, floating in the flames. (Was Wendy beautiful? I never thought about it at all. Wendy was backdrop.)

  I seem to have a moment of choice.

  Christina has gone already, ascending from sight. Wendy is running earthward.

  “Wendy!” I beg. “Wendy! Don’t leave me!”

  And she takes my hand.

  Today was my coming out.

  I was afraid of the mirror, not wanting extraneous information. I have made up my mind that I am beautiful, a simple act of will.

  My hair has been secretly growing inside its egg, soft as the down on a gestating chicken. I rake my fingers through it and toss it free. This is a different incarnation, a new adventure.

  I hold my breath and look in the mirror. A stranger, someone I am just getting to know, stares back. This face, I think bravely, is an interesting face. When its eyes flash it will have a kind of aura more potent than before. And yet it is softer. Its scars caress it like ghostly ferns.

  I touch them wonderingly, rather proudly.

  I am on my way.

  I am on my way to see Wendy.

  “Don’t leave me,” I will say. “Dearest Wendy, don’t leave me.” And then, I think, we will put our arms around each other.

  Mosie

  I guess I’ve heard everything.

  “Mosie,” she says to me about two weeks ago in her frail little voice that smells of old furniture and nerves, “I need a gun. Do you think one of your boys … ?”

  She’s part of my regulars, I got a lot of them in this building. I’ve cleaned for them, and ironed, and polished the silver, and sewed their children’s and grandchildren’s name tags into clothes for summer camp and such. They just about as hardy as me, my regulars. And we all just about as tough as those oaks in Central Park, the ones up along the edge at 110th, get the worst of the city dirt. What I mean is, our kids are grown up, we shed our husbands and all our leaves, we pretty near stripped bare, but we keep on going. These days, though, I got to keep my eye on my regulars, I got to remove the occasional bottle of sherry or Scotch that has been emptied on the quiet. I got to be tactful. And maybe they’ll slip me an extra five or ten dollars, ever so casual, as though they don’t know what that is, left there under the silver tray, as though they don’t know it got any connection with one of my boys getting hold of some more Jack Daniels at a special discount price. (My boys have certain connections.) Live and let live, I say, things all shake out in the end. I couldn’t have raised a family on what Columbia University paid me for scrubbing stairwells, now could I?

  “Do you think one of your boys … ?” she says to me.

  My boys have ways, I don’t inquire too closely, we all have to survive.

  “For self-protection,” she says. “An elderly woman can’t be too careful after something like … you know …”

  That incident on the comer of West 112th and Amsterdam is what she means. It wasn’t a pretty sight, it even affected me quite bad and I’ve seen plenty. Still, the way she went on, and she only saw it on the television.

  “Oh my god, Mosie!” she says. “Oh my god.”

  She is trembling like crazy, like she’s one of those brown leaves hanging on to the end of a branch in Morningside Park in November and a wind has got hold of her. I have to turn off the iron and hang her cotton petticoat on a chairback. They’re thinner than air, those old cotton petticoats of hers, and should have gone to the Goodwill or the St Vincent de Paul long ago, but then what would her ladyship do? Wear nylon or polyester next to her private skin? Ha. I got me a riddle for all these old Columbia biddies, I like to make them stop and think. Question: What’s here forever but gets smaller every year and disappears faster every month? Answer: A Columbia widow’s pension.

  Listen, I tell them. I’m in the same boat, and mine was nothing to start with. Columbia will always look after you, my late Willy used to say. He loved the place. There’s students and professors still send me Christmas cards on account of him. Huh, I used to tell him. Don’t talk to me about Columbia, I know what goes on in professors’ apartments. Don’t tell me about Nobel Prizes and such, I wash their underwear, I know a thing or two. Just hush your mouth, Willy used to say. Columbia give us a good life.

  Hah.

  What Columbia give me when Willy died was a piece of paper in a frame (special paper, I admit, the kind that looks like it got leprosy or something, all spotty and runny if you hold it up to the light) where it thanks him in Latin for fixing their furnaces for fifty years. I still got that somewhere. Under one of the beds, probably. In a carton. The boys might be able to get something for it, there’s all kinds of collectors these days.

  So listen, I tell these old biddies, don’t talk to me about hard times. I know. But I got to admit, I got my boys to fall back on, and cleaning and ironing and stuff. And what have they got? It’s harder for them, I admit it, though they got me to keep an eye on them.

  Listen, I say, to cheer them up. It could be a lot worse. If we didn’t have good old 388 West 116th, for example, if we didn’t have old Ma Columbia for landlord, if we didn’t have these rent control goodies. Course, I say, we got to be realistic. There’s a whole raft of johnny-come-latelies up there in the business office that’s tearing their hair over ancient promises to Columbia widows. They got lawyers in droves up there jus
t looking for ways to ditch old promises. You mark my words, I tell them, one of these days the rents will go right through our peeling eighteen-foot ceilings and we’ll all be bag ladies together. So just be thankful, I tell them, for what we got in the here and now.

  But that’s what I call my shock treatment, and I don’t pull it out too often. I seen it backfire. There’s occasions I’ve had to call a doctor. But used right, when one of my regulars is into a little “What’s the point of eating or getting dressed?” act, it can work better’n a shot of hooch in their Tetley’s.

  Well, like I was saying, Mrs C. Talbot Percy got into quite a state when she saw that business at West 112th on the evening news. “Oh Mosie,” she stutters, her teeth clicking like knitting needles. “Only four blocks away. And I was talking to him only this morning. On that very spot,” she says. “Oh my god.”

  Well, I think to myself, you just lucky you didn’t pass that very spot at three-thirty this afternoon, like I did. Pieces of skull like busted eggshell all over the place. I’m telling you, I’m glad I’m not the person has to clean it up. But all I do is hang up her cotton petticoats and put a dash of something in a cup of hot tea to calm her down.

  It don’t work too well, I guess, on this particular occasion. Don’t keep her still. She is prowling around like a tetchy cat in heat, that jittery-skittery way they have. She opens up the French windows and leans out over the little bitty iron balcony that got to be at least as wide as a split fingernail. (Everyone got one, except me in the basement, and I’m darned if I know what they for unless to give a leg up to certain people like my boys in certain operations. I don’t inquire too closely.) Well, she is leaning out over this little bitty shelf and looking down on the mansion, that’s the president of Columbia’s place, which as everyone knows is now emptier than a whorehouse after a raid. (Didn’t used to be. I’ve cleaned up after a party or two at that house in my time.) And she covers her face with her hands and she turns to me and says, “Oh Mosie, where now the horse and his rider?”

  I’m not kidding you. That’s exactly what she says, in her Chaucer-saucer voice (that’s what I call it). She says stuff like that all the time. “Oh Mosie,” she’ll say, when Mrs W.W. Emberson upstairs takes off for Florida each October, “than longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.” (I got to work real hard not to giggle when that one comes out like clockwork.) And I’ll count to three, and sure enough she’ll sigh and say: “C. Talbot’s field, you know, Mosie. Medieval. He read Chaucer.”