by Ann Beattie
A young man in his early twenties, at the other end of the sofa, was watching John out of the corner of his eye. John was trying to look normal, to convince his body that it could function normally. It would be humiliating to fall over in the waiting room. He tried to breathe normally. To blink. It was difficult not to blink hard and often when you thought about blinking. It was hopeless the way it was hopeless to be aware of your tongue and not have it feel too big for your mouth. The man was holding something out to him, with a little corona of light around it. The light faded as John stared at the pack of gum with one piece slid out, finally realizing what it was. “No thanks,” he said. He tried to remember the last time he had chewed gum. With Brandt, about a year ago, to show him how to chew without making faces. Pilar, his mother’s cook, had introduced him to chewing gum. She also let him eat raw cookie dough, which was bad for him. However, as his mother always said when she finished a list of grievances against Pilar, she never skimped on lime in the gin and tonics, and never once had they run out of ice. Her stews were very good, although she would make them all summer long unless she was stopped. His mother had recently given Pilar some cookbooks with recipes for cold summer meals. Diced cucumber and cold salmon loaf. Argentine eggs with pasta. He had just been offered a stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and his mouth was watering as much as it would if he had taken the stick and chewed it. He could smell the gum. He looked at the young man. The man was looking at him.
“It’s a bitch,” the man said.
He nodded. “You know somebody who’s a patient here?”
“My wife. She was cutting the lawn, and she fell over. I thought she was dead. What a bitch. Mower kept going and crashed into the house. I wouldn’t have known. Had the television on. What a bitch.” He snapped his gum three times. “How about you?” he said.
“You probably read it in the papers,” John said. “My son shot my daughter.”
“I haven’t seen a paper in two weeks. My wife and I were in Ashland, Oregon. Come home and unpack, and the next day, whammo! She’s on her back in the yard. I thought she was kidding. They think it’s her heart, but nothing shows.” He had stopped chewing. “I don’t know what to say about what you said. I heard you, but I don’t know what to say. They young kids, fooling around, or what?”
“Ten and fifteen. My son is ten.”
“Holy shit,” the man said. “An accident, huh? How’d he get a gun?”
“Apparently it was around his friend’s house, in a box. The kid’s father didn’t have any idea his son knew the gun was there. How the gun got out of the box and into my son’s hands is still up in the air.”
“Holy shit,” the man said. “Ten and fifteen. She all right?”
“Yes. She’s going to be all right.”
“Holy holy,” the man said. “Lucky she wasn’t blown away. If you can say anybody’s lucky who’s been shot. I didn’t read about it in the papers. What’s it like, having a story about you in the paper? Never mind. That isn’t any of my business. You don’t chew gum? There’s a Coke machine hidden behind that door.”
The man pointed. He had a turquoise and silver ring on his index finger. His nails were a little long, and dirty.
“Thanks. I might get one later.”
“I wonder how many people are sitting around here, or lying in bed here, wondering what they did wrong? I left the room because the lady my wife shares it with was being examined. Not examined, butchered. A bone marrow extract. My God. One day in Ashland, the next day here.” The man lit a cigarette, offering one to John. John shook his head no. “Not exactly the next day. I barrel-assed back from Ashland, but it still took five days, you know? Not the next day really, but so to speak. Holy shit. I can’t believe I’m sitting here. Her sister’s coming, and it’s just as well if I can have a word with her before she goes in to see my wife. Her sister’s a nun, and my wife is an agnostic, and I want to try to get her to keep religion out of it. Just seeing her sister in her penguin get-up sets her off as it is. Some orders wear normal clothes now, but not her sister’s order. They voted no. Imagine. Jesus.”
“I thought I was going to faint a few minutes ago,” John said.
“You looked like it,” the man said. “I was all set to slide down the sofa and push your head between your knees. That works, you know.”
“I should go back to her room now,” John said. “They were having lunch.”
“My wife blew lunch yesterday,” the man said. “Cottage cheese and custard. Maybe not exactly cottage cheese, but something like it. I wonder how many people are sitting around this hospital right at this minute, trying to figure things out. This place is probably sending out more vibes than the Rand Corporation.”
He tried Nick again. This time nobody answered the phone. He let it ring six times, then hung up and took his dime back. He wondered if Metcalf could be right: Would Nick really be so childish as to subscribe Metcalf to magazines? It was absurd the way Nick always got riled up about Metcalf: He had a picture of Metcalf (taken at a picnic several years ago) enlarged to eight by ten, and hung it on the bathroom wall, in his apartment, to decondition himself. Nick thought that if he could look at Metcalf’s face without going wild, he could handle him better in person. But the picture just drove him crazy. One night when he was drunk, he got spooked about going into the bathroom, even though he knew where the picture was and wouldn’t have to look in that direction; he went into the kitchen instead and peed into an empty wine bottle. That absurdity, and the absurdity of Metcalf’s scheme to keep his lover around. The absurdity of being out of your mind, showing up at six in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever it was, at your lover’s apartment and finding a man there, even if nothing was going on. The craziness of going there. The craziness of finding happiness when you couldn’t have it; or of planning to have it, only to have this happen. It had happened. And Mary was in the room, waiting for him. He walked down the corridor and into her room. Her face was white, and her hospital gown and the sheets; and the sun had shifted so that the blinds looked bright white, strongly illuminated from behind. The nurse was taking Mary’s temperature. When he was a child, his mother had gone around in the evening with a thermometer in her mouth, because she had read somewhere that it would firm up the jawline. For a while his mother had cared about wrinkles. He could remember his father suggesting a straw instead, because a thermometer was depressing. His mother said that a straw would not be the same. You had to know the mercury was in there. You had to be steady and careful. You could not bite down. The thermometer they had at the hospital stood in a white plastic stand when it was not in use.
“Your mother’s in with John Joel,” he said. “Did I tell you that? She told me that she’s coming to see you at two or three. And Angela called this morning, and I told her it would be all right to visit. Was that all right to tell her?”
“She’s going to think I look gross,” Mary said.
“We’re all glad you’re all right. That’s all,” John said.
“That’s not all Angela thinks. I talked to her on the phone yesterday, and all she wanted to hear about was how big a bandage it was. She thinks it’s better that this happened than that I lost my tits like Marge Pendergast, or something. She wanted to know if they bathed me in bed every day. She thinks it’s a resort. She’s pretty stupid sometimes.”
“Should I have told her not to come?”
“Sure,” Mary said. “She’s only my best friend.”
“Your temperature’s normal. I’m not supposed to give any of that information, but it is, and why should I hold out on you about good news?” the nurse said.
“She doesn’t have circles under her eyes today,” John said.
“When she did, nobody said anything, and that was the right thing to do,” the nurse said. “It’s discouraging to patients to be told they look bad. I’ve been in rooms where people walked in and clamped their hands over their mouths.”
He pulled the small chair up to her bed. “Was lun
ch good?” he said.
“Suck-o,” Mary said.
“I was down in the sitting room, and I thought over what you said. Do you think it would be nice for all of us if there was a dog? We could get a dog when we come back from the vacation.”
“You’re moving back?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. Her eyes glazed when he said it, like a sick person’s. “In any case, we’re taking a vacation, and I think that you’re right—your mother might like a dog, and you might like it, too. What do you say?”
“You forgot him,” Mary said. “He’s coming back too, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Sure. After a little while. He’s talking to some doctors now, and he’s going to be staying with Grandma for a while.”
“She must think the sky is falling.”
“I imagine she does. She doesn’t cover up very well. When she’s upset she cries and raves. She knocked over one of her vases. You would have liked to have seen it. Pilar ran into the room and dealt with it. Pilar can deal with anything. I once saw Pilar swatting a fly with one hand while she was using a whisk to beat an egg with the other, and she never missed a beat.”
“Unhygienic,” the nurse said. “This is your mother’s cook? I like your mother, though. She’s a fine lady. I’m sure this cook is the right person for the job if your mother thinks so.”
He took Mary’s hand. It was small and tender. He moved his hand over hers, stroking, wondering how her hand could be so warm in such a cool room if she had no fever. He remembered Nina’s hand on his head, and the way she had asked, “Are you in shock?” In fact, he had been—or out of his mind, at least. To prove that he was sane, he had tried to re-create for Nina his trip into New York, but he had gotten bogged down trying to remember whether he said goodbye to Louise or not. He thought he had been in the house and then left, but maybe he had been in the house only when Tiffy was there, before he knew what had happened, when he came home and saw the police car blocking his driveway. He had once joked to Nina that there were pillars, and she had believed it. He could imagine pillars, rising up, 2001 music playing as they went higher and higher. He could not imagine living in that house again, and he wondered if Mary could, either. He was holding her hand, and it was still as warm, as clammy. He bent over and kissed her hand, and she drew it away. There was a Band-Aid in the crook of her arm, from the intravenous. A bruise spread out beneath the Band-Aid. The nurse had put it there, because, she said, looking at needle marks and bruises was upsetting. “Everyone isn’t like me. Other people aren’t accustomed to things that are physically ugly, and it’s easy to forget that. I always try to remember that the patient is the patient, and I am me.
Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit. Mary in her white bag of a hospital gown. Mary herself. He had been so surprised to have a baby, and then two, and then three. Different-sized children. Mary the first of them. It made him sentimental in a way he couldn’t remember being sentimental before. If she could be born again, it would be in low light, with music playing, and he would be there, humming along with the music. That would certainly make him pass out, if just being in the hospital made him queasy. Mary’s birth. The time before Mary. The time before Louise. If you could only go backward, however awkwardly, like running backward without looking, depending on memory so that you didn’t crash into something, hoping some sixth sense would protect you. Going backward that way as an adult would be like a small child’s going forward—your footing unsure, trusting a hand to be outstretched at the crucial moment, for a table to be sturdy and not light. To be able to walk, to balance, to progress. He remembered Mary toddling, Louise luring her with some toy, shaking an elephant or a lion, calling to her, “Come on, Mary. That’s right.” Mary hanging back, gripping his thumb, wanting to go but afraid of all that space between hands, the gap between what was behind her and the lion. Then she had half-run forward, awkwardly, and grabbed the prize. Someone had told him (Tiffy? One of the policemen? Somebody, anyway) that she had just fallen, and there had been no scream that Louise or Tiffy had heard. (That’s right, Tiffy had told him.) They had just gone out into the backyard and there they all were, four of them standing and one on the ground, as silent as actors about to begin a pantomime. But then Louise had started screaming. Her screaming had made Parker cry, and John Joel. And then Parker ran across the field, shouting back that the gun wasn’t his, that John Joel had done it, and John Joel had waited in the house, upstairs in his room. He had been sent to his room, like a bad boy, until the ambulance got there. Louise kept trying to move Mary, to shake her, tug at her. Tiffy had had a hard time convincing her to let her be still. His daughter, lying still on the ground. Still in a hospital bed. Her stillness had made him move erratically, frantically. Suddenly he was not at the hospital, not at the house in Connecticut, but in New York, in the familiar garage, talking to a taxi driver, getting out at Columbus Avenue, opening the door and going up the stairs. It hadn’t been until then that the tiredness had hit him—the tiredness and the shock. It was like trying to wish yourself awake from a bad dream, steps and more steps, like layers upon layers, and he couldn’t make a sound. There had been a little noise on the street, but inside the building, nothing. It was quiet, like the floor of the ocean, and he was trying to reach the top. He could feel the sweat running down his face, and from somewhere far-off—not from any place he could identify—he was watching himself move forward, step after step, moving in slow motion to reach the landing. Moving deliberately in slow motion, perhaps, because what could he say? And if he said it, what could she do? What did he want her to do? What had John Joel wanted from Mary? He had wanted to be rid of her. He had wondered if telling Nina would frighten her, make her go. He didn’t want that. He wanted her, he wanted not to be swimming, to bound up the stairs, minus bouquet and top hat but still charming, ready for… She did not open the door, of course, in a long gown, and he did not take her in his arms for a dance. There was no graceful movement at all. He was exhausted from the climb, and the man-he had stood and gaped at the man as surprised as if the man were naked. And then Nina had said the man’s name, and that she had not slept with him, no matter what he was thinking. He was thinking: I’m alive. Even Mary is alive. My son shot my daughter. But it was impossible to talk about it. Everything went on, in slow motion. His following her into the kitchen, his legs so heavy that he could not believe that they were not ballooning. She had been cutting fruit. Simply fixing breakfast, cutting fruit. He had walked into ordinary life, and the little accidents of ordinary life—Nina’s cut finger. While she was gone he had continued to peel and chop the orange. The juice ran down his hands and wrists. He was holding the peeled orange, baseball-sized but soft, soft and juicy, it must have been like something the doctors had seen inside Mary’s body. Didn’t medical students practice cutting oranges because oranges were like certain tissues in the body? Oranges punctured with needles, as they learned to give injections? He held the peeled orange and stared at it. Then he put it on the chopping board and chopped it, sprinkled the wet pieces over her bowl of cereal. He waited for her to come back. He went to the bathroom door and saw her, washing her sleeve, bandaging the finger. He had wanted to tell her all of it, in detail, but he hadn’t been there, he would have to make the details up. He could describe the field, the day, but the blood—he hadn’t been there to see the blood, or Tiffy in the field, then Louise, Parker streaking past them, screaming that he had not done it. And what happened from there? How did John Joel go to his bedroom? How had he driven into New York? He was in Nina’s apartment and she was right—he loved it, small as a womb. He was comfortable with the small movements he could make. And how had he gotten from the bathroom door into Nina’s bedroom? In time. Floating. The dead-man’s float. Lying face down on her mattress, arms outstretched. He had wanted to tell her, before any more time passed, before she left the bathroom; but she had pushed past him, and he had said nothing, only that he had peeled the orange. Chopped the orange. He wanted to say
: Am I crazy? But she would have thought he was talking about his peeling the orange when he knew she was angry with him. When he realized that it was right not to have spoken, he also realized that then he wasn’t crazy. If he wasn’t crazy, then he would just be a normal person, telling a story about a crazy person. The crazy person was his son. Born of his genes. Seeds of the orange.
Mary’s eyes were closed. Mrs. Patterson, seeing that they were, allowed herself to look directly at John. She moved her head, telling him silently that he should go away from the bed. He moved back, cocked his head. She was lying there, suddenly asleep. People got heavier when they were unconscious. He remembered carrying her, when she was a child, taking her along with them when they had dinner with friends, putting her down to rest in the friend’s bed, then picking her up again and taking her home, dead weight pressed against him. The awkwardness of it, the way all her weight seemed to be concentrated in the middle of her body: Her arms and legs were so light they dangled and flapped. Inadvertently she would kick. As she got larger, her foot hit against him, kicking him in the balls. He knew she would not kick in her sleep, but still he would hunch forward, warding off the pain, and as he hunched she would slip down farther and farther. He had been awkward in a lot of ways. He had been awkward about leaving, coming back the way a drunken guest returns, apologizing, for a sweater, and then for a wallet, everyone knowing the person is drunk, the person wanting to appear only forgetful. He had wanted to appear sensible, and they had all known that what he was doing did not make sense. There had been the excuse of his mother’s illness, but when that passed it was so awkward that he did not go back. He could not go back, because for a long time, for years, he had felt like a guest, like someone who could only go so far, and then have to stop: feet on the footstool, but not tucked under you on the chair; a long soak in the bathtub, but then you had to scrub the ring away; a plant to be admired, but how could you know how much water it needed? Everything was being taken care of. He was visiting. He even had the manners to bring flowers, occasionally. A bottle of wine. He knew the things they liked, and they knew what he liked. It could have gone on. If it had, things might even have changed. It could have gone on like a reel of movie film spinning, but he started to get dizzy, to lose his breath. He started to edge away, delicately, as delicately as he could. Like shaving with a safety razor—you could only do it so delicately. You could know the strokes, the feel of the blade on the skin, just how much lather to put on; but still the skin would pull an unexpected way, a microscopic imperfection of the blade would result in a nick. He had told Louise, shaving, that the move was going to be permanent for a while. That was the way he had said it—awkwardly, like some bumbling child. An adolescent, cutting himself shaving. Lies: because he couldn’t stand the commute; because his mother needed him, even if she wasn’t dying. A trickle of blood had come up through the lather—a little cut he hadn’t even felt. “Do you want me to feel sorry for you?” she had said. She had not moved off the side of the tub, where she sat. She had watched him continue shaving, watched him hold the styptic stick to his cheek, cursing that it wasn’t working and he was in a hurry. He suddenly remembered what she had said to him: She had come up behind him, put her arms around him, and said, with her head buried in his back, “You hate blood, don’t you?” She was right. She knew him very well. And she was clever, too. Because she had not been talking about blood.